Time is right for the biggest edition of The Emirates Airlines Festival of Literature

Isobel Abulhoul, director of Dubai’s Emirates Airline Festival of Literature, explains why the 2016 edition – with “time” as its theme – will be the biggest yet.

Why has the festival been extended to two weekends?

I think it is a natural progression, but we didn’t expect it to be quite as extensive and so soon. If you look at the models of the great literary festivals around the world, they start off as a weekend and grow from there. At the moment, our festival is as long as the Cheltenham Literature Festival, which is oldest literary festival in the world. They are 60 odd years old and we are into our eighth year, so the progress and speed that we made is fantastic. We have also been inundated with authors who wanted to come because they heard so many great thing about the festival and the UAE. We thought, well, we can’t say no because this is a fantastic author and we had to accommodate them – and the only way we could do that was to actually extend the time of the festival.

Original article by Saeed Saeed

Continue reading at The National:

Time is right for the biggest edition of The Emirates Airlines Festival of Literature