Censorship row echoes through Dubai literary festival
The Guardian's literary editor reports from a debate on freedom of expression at the Emirates Airline International Festival of Literature in Dubai
Claire Armitstead, Dubai writing in the guardian.co.uk, Monday 2 March 2009

Left - A panel of speakers participate in a video conference with Margaret Atwood (left, screen background), vice-president of PEN, during the Emirates International Festival of Literature in Dubai. The other speakers are (L to R) Ibrahim Nasrallah, Andrei Kurkov, Rachel Billington, PEN secretary Eugene Schoulgin, Rajaa al-Sanea and vice-chairman of the Dubai Culture and Arts Authority and festival host Mohammed al-Murr.
Photograph: Haider Shah/AFP/Getty Images


After publicly questioning her decision to boycott the first Emirates Airline International Festival of Literature following a row over alleged censorship, Margaret Atwood has atoned by making two virtual appearances at the festival this weekend via videolink from Toronto.
As well as taking part in an interview in which she discussed her writing career, she also participated in a hastily arranged censorship debate on Saturday morning, involving nine writers from around the world, all of whom tiptoed around an issue which became known to participants at the four-day festival as "the elephant in the room".
This issue was sparked by a controversy over the festival's apparent blacklisting of Geraldine Bedell's novel, The Gulf Between Us. The novel, featuring a gay sheikh, turned out not to have been banned from the festival at all; although director Isobel Abulhoul naively listed several reasons why the novel might not go down well in a Muslim state when she declined a request from Bedell's publisher, Penguin, to launch The Gulf Between Us at the festival, her underlying reasoning was agreed to be sound: the launch of a debut novel by an unknown British author was unlikely to create as much of a splash as, say, that of the latest from the 100m-plus selling veteran of the historical romance Wilbur Smith.
Nevertheless, the incident led to a spotlight being turned on the prevalence of censorship in the Arab world, particularly in a state that recently jailed three journalists for defamation over offence caused by writing on the internet. (Shaikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum, the emir of Dubai who is also its vice-president and prime minister, has since decreed that no journalist should receive a prison sentence for press-related offences, and the journalists have all been released from jail.) Though nobody in the censorship debate was prepared to confront the beast head on, their circumlocutions were both interesting and revealing.
Read the rest of this report by linking to the Guardian online.