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 organisers, 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.