With its traditional craft culture, bohemian cafes and misty valley vistas, Ubud in Bali seems custom-made for its twin industries of art and tourism: travellers here have been feeling the pull of poetry and drama for decades.
This tradition is now official, bottled, capped and priced each October as the Ubud Writers' and Readers' Festival. For four days every year many of the town's museums, restaurants, bars and yoga studios play host to wordsmiths and their fans as they grapple with literary themes over thick Bali-grown coffee.
The brainchild of Australian local business owner Janet de Neefe and her Indonesian husband, the festival was established to regenerate tourism after the 2002 bombings; six editions later it is still doing so - and acting as a who's who of Asian literati. This year saw India's Vikas Swarup, author of Q&A (on which hit movie Slumdog Millionaire is based), Pakistani journalists and novelists Mohammed Hanif and Fatima Bhutto, and Singapore's Shamini Flint, author of the irreverent Inspector Singh Investigates series, appear alongside nearly 100 other poets, journalists and literary critics from across the continent and beyond. The festival also offered its first Nobel laureate: Wole Soyinka, a Nigerian novelist, playwright and political activist.
To a backdrop of free events - play readings, a poetry slam night and book launches - attendees were offered a tight schedule of writers' panels. With writers such as Bhutto and Soyinka in town, the content of debates was often political. And although most of the festival-goers seemed to be from Australia, the panel perspectives were Asian and African. US President Barack Obama received a drubbing in a panel called Writing in the New World: Obama and Dissent, with Bhutto (niece of former Pakistan prime minister Benazir Bhutto) reminding writers of their responsibility to stay critical.
Soyinka, who spent nearly two years in solitary confinement for his activism, spoke at length on the concept of forgiveness. As strident and satirical as his works tend to be, he noted that writing was about understanding the choices people made to survive, and that although atrocities were 'part and parcel of our very existence', literature could play a part in reconciliation.
Several of the writers explored Asian themes in their novels. Flint, a former lawyer, had her Inspector Singh investigating a case of marital injustice in Malaysia, the events caught between Muslim shariah law and the penal code; Singh would next be sent to Cambodia to uncover a mystery involving the Khmer Rouge. Swarup, who reportedly wrote Q&A in two months while his family were away for the summer, followed it up with murder mystery Six Suspects, another look at Indian castes and corruption.
But the festival's greatest value lay in introducing visiting readers to underexposed Indonesian writing and the country's politics. A number of the panels were bilingual and the festival organisers worked with Indonesian critics and journalists to join emerging local writers with old hands, such as firebrand Seno Gumira Ajidarma, known for his work on East Timor, and Cok Sawitri, an outspoken lesbian writer.
