Dubai Festival of Literature: Censorship, women writers...and camels
At the first Dubai Festival of Literature last weekend, disparate writers gathered from all over the world.
By Katy Guest writing in The Independent
Friday, 6 March 2009

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Author Anita Nair addresses the Dubai audience

According to the author Robert Irwin, there is a verb in Arabic, aqrahu, which has to do with contending with another for superior glory and generosity in the hocking or slaughtering of camels. This is one of many things that his audience learned in the event: The Camel: Everything You've Ever Wanted to Know ... and Plenty You Didn't. It could also have served as a metaphor for the inaugural Emirates Airline International Festival of Literature.

Dubai is a city of firsts, biggests and most expensives. It has the largest population in the United Arab Emirates. The Burj Al Arab is the world's tallest building. It appears to contain more women in burkas carrying Chanel handbags than anywhere else in the known universe. It makes sense, then, that it should host the "first true literary festival in the Middle East, celebrating the world of books in all its infinite variety". If this was an attempt to buy a little class in the midst of a cultural desert, it worked. And so, for an all-too-fleeting four days last week, the InterContinental hotel in Dubai, Festival City, became an oasis of cultivation in the otherwise featureless landscape of designer labels and oil billionaires.

British audiences would be forgiven for knowing only one thing about EAIFL: that it "banned" the author Geraldine Bedell, and her book The Gulf Between Us, because it had a gay character. A fortnight before the festival began, Bedell revealed that the director had rejected her novel on the grounds that "I do not want our festival remembered for the launch of a controversial book." Margaret Atwood, the vice-president of the freedom of speech charity International PEN, pulled out of her event there – before sheepishly attempting to pull back in again when she discovered that all was not as it seemed.

Link here for the full report from The Independent.