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Publishers are struggling, bookshops closing, yet literary festivals go on booming. To see why, Anthony Gardner visits five, from Devon to Dubai
By Anthony Gardner
On a warm March evening, a black double-decker full of writers pulls up at the vast Cultural and Scientific Association in Dubai. Purple spotlights bathe the palm trees; lime-green banners flutter in the breeze; a white-robed male-voice choir chants a welcome. The writers enter the gilded-marble atrium looking faintly baffled.
Thus begins the 2015 Emirates Airline Festival of Literature. Authors have flown in from Britain, America, India and Iceland, as well as the Middle East. In the sumptuous auditorium, partly modelled on an Arab fortress, I find myself next to the novelist Joanna Trollope, who admits to “an edge of misgiving”.
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