UBUD WRITERS & READERS FESTIVAL 2009
From our special reporter Katie Jacobs, pictured left with the tireless festival director Janet de Neefe.

1.
Today, Thursday was the first full day of discussion and panels. All day I continued to be caught by surprise by attending sessions full of intense dialogue and questioning and the juxtaposition of spilling out into the winding tropical streets of Ubud, dropping away into jungle-filled ravines. It is a very special event.

After the keynote speech by Michael Bliss, a representative of the Australian Embassy, who extolled the continued compassion and solidarity expressed by Australia towards Indonesia and its people, the first major session was entitled "The Future of Compassion" featuring Wole Soyinka from Nigeria, the number one star of the festival and the first Nobel laureate from Africa and Seno Gumira Ajidarma, an Indonesian journalist and writer who has long challenged the social and human rights injustices which have occurred within Indonesia, infamously with regard to East Timor.
The session was very political and argued definitions and boundaries of compassion by those who have had more extreme situations in which to apply it than most. There were also lighter notes, most notably with Mr Soyinka commenting on Australia's "lack" of compassion in asking him to fill out extra visa forms of a personal nature due to his 70 years of age.

2.
In a much more intimate setting, The Left Bank Lounge, three writers, Arnold Zable Mohan,(pic left with Vinita Ramani Mohan),from Australia, Clara Ng from Indonesia and Vinita Ramani Mohan from Singapore discussed "The Role of Storytelling".

The discussion was of a much more literary nature from the previous ones and focused on the storyteller as a conduit including responsibility to those whose stories you are telling.

I was particularly impressed by Arnold Zable and his writings in this session. He is the son of Yiddish holocaust survivors and grew up (and still lives) in Melbourne. He has been collecting stories his whole life from his surrounding ethnic communities which form the basis of his fiction. He described the care he takes in working with them to make sure he is correctly representing them and their stories in his books. (To quote Mr Zable S=ER squared, or Story equals Entry into a Relationship over a period of time.)
3.
In the afternoon, in a standing room only restaurant, I attended "A conversation with Fatima Bhutto and Bejan Matur" (who actually identifies as Alevi Kurdish rather than Turkish as I described her in an earlier post). This was another intense conversation with two young women who lead very political lives, choosing to serve as witnesses and reporters of their cultures, countries and communities.