Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Sri Lanka's First Literary Festival

Sri Lanka's first international literary festival is to be held in the historic southern seaside town of Galle, 11-14th January 2007. The exciting line up includes:
William Dalrymple, world renowned ex BBC correspondent & author Sir Mark Tully, Arthur C Clarke, distinguished biographer Victoria Glendinning, Sri Lankan authors Yasmine Gooneratne & Romesh Gunusekera, Christopher Kremmer, Suketu Mehta, Madhur Jaffrey, Nury Vittachi, Deepika Shetty, Elmo Jayawardena and a list of Sri Lankan authors who have won Michael Ondaatje’s Gratiaen Prize over the past years.
The festival will also honour one of Sri Lanka's most renown authors Nihal de Silva who was killed this year in a landmine explosion. (I hadn't heard of him before, but anyone who writes and loves birdwatching is close to my heart - right, Glenda?)

Organiser Libby Southwell sent me a press release which I'm happy to pass on, and will let you know more news when I have it.

I'd love to go to this. (Imagine meeting Arthur C. Clarke!) But I just looked at the airfare on MAS. I'd have to write an awful lot of articles to cover that.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Imagine stepping on a land mine in a national park. It's weird how matter-of-fact the news article was. It will be cloudy with isolated thunderstorms, and a family was killed by a land mine in a national park.

bibliobibuli said...

it's really scary ...

Anonymous said...

it was more like driving over the landmine rather than stepping on it. He had been visiting the game park with friends, and on their morning round they had driven over the landmine which most probably had been placed there earlier. All the people in the vehicle died.