Authors Launch Literary Festival in Cities of the West Bank

Roddy Doyle, Esther Freud, David Hare and Ahdaf Soueif will this week launch the first international literary festival in the occupied Palestinian territories. Seventeen British, American, Indian and Arab authors will visit four West Bank cities for the inaugural Palestinian Festival of Literature, subtitled: "The power of culture and the culture of power."

Soueif, one of the festival's organizers, said they had invited "authors who we really liked, and who showed a concern for the world in general".

Others taking part include the Scottish writer Andrew O'Hagan and Pankaj Mishra, who is Indian, as well as the British-Sudanese writer Jamal Mahjoub, and the American-Palestinian poet Suheir Hammad. They will work with Palestinian writers at events in Ramallah, Jerusalem, Jenin and Bethlehem.

Soueif said that the lack of Israelis taking part was not deliberate, but added: "I'm resistant to this idea of always having to twin, that every time you talk about Palestine you have to invite an Israeli, or vice versa. They aren't twinned."

"I have a bit of a trades union attitude when it comes to writers," O'Hagan said. "I admire their individual expertise and I support their collective influence.

"So when I see authors in the world who are silenced or punished or rubbished it feels to me like a personal insult."

The trip, he said, was "not about taking sides but is about arguing for reason and imagination to enjoy its freedoms in a situation dominated by oppressive bigotry".

The London-based Lebanese novelist Hanan al-Shaykh, one of the party, has Palestinian family members but has never visited the West Bank before. "It was always in my mind or my heart, but I never thought I would go," she said.

"I feel personally as if it is forgotten, as if it is like a no man's land, a no-no land. Now that there are festivals in Brazil, in Colombia, everywhere, Palestine and the occupied territories should be one of them. There shouldn't be any obstacles to literature anywhere on Earth."

The festival, which is supported by the British Council and Unesco as well as a number of charitable foundations, may become an annual event, Soueif said, adding that she hoped the project would encourage publishers to translate the authors' works into Arabic and English.