Emirates Airline Festival: A Literary Oasis Amid the Dazzle of Dubai
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Tag: Emirates Airline Festival of Literature
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It has been a long and brutal winter in Toronto. So, when I was invited to the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature in early March, I took only a few minutes to respond with an eager yes.
It’s not that I knew much about Dubai or had harbored a desire to visit. But being a curious cat, I wanted to see what this place was all about, how people felt about living there, and how books figured in their lives.
As with everywhere I have traveled, I found a place of far more complexity, texture, and nuance than I had anticipated. Wherever you find people, you find vast diversity. As expected, Dubai dazzles and confuses with its curious combination of Muslim and tribal traditions mixed with capitalism on steroids. But what surprised me most from my short stay was the cultural and cosmopolitan vibrancy that can only be found in a young and optimistic society. Apart from the glam and glitz of over-the-top malls and walls of impossibly tall and narrow skyscrapers reaching up from the desert, this city is making big business of the arts and seemingly doing so with energy, excitement, and a refreshing lack of cynicism.
Thanks to my friend Francis McGovern of Literary Traveler, I joined a small group of journalists covering the festival and Dubai at large.
“I want the festival to be as open and accessible to everyone as possible. We shouldn’t be keepers of taste, and I am a great believer that any reading is good for you, so unusually for a literature festival I see as us as a festival for non-readers rather than avid readers, because I want us to encourage people pick up a book for pleasure.”
Thirty thousand people, young and old and from all different backgrounds, together with authors came to Dubai over these five days in March. There were special sessions for children, a female focus strand, literary lunches, and writing master classes. Sessions were simultaneously translated from Arabic or English or vice versa. Casual conversations across boundaries were easy and common. The atmosphere at the InterContinental Hotel Festival City was more carnival than conference.
Here were some highlights for me:
Children of all ages and cultural backgrounds were everywhere. Many sessions were oriented toward their particular interests. Others were focused on writing for children. It was especially thrilling to see kids who couldn’t wait to peel off on their own with a newly acquired book.
There was also a murder mystery dinner; the annual George Orwell Lecture, given this year by the BBC’s Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen; and a magnificent lunch with celeb chef Greg Malouf, who has recently relocated to the UAE and is planning to open his first, as yet unnamed, restaurant in Dubai.
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