Living Literature: Festival des Écrivains du Monde

Paris is not only the City of Lights, it also proves to be a City of Literature. Literature in all its shapes and form, from poetry slams to Readings to literary festivals.

From September 20 to September 22, Columbia University and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France hosted the “Festival des Écrivains du Monde” in Paris. And what was promised in the title was exactly what was delivered. For three days, 30 literary events were organized all over Paris, from the courtyard of the Centre Culture Irlandaise à Paris to the Auditorium in the Louvre. It was almost impossible to decide which reading to attend, whether or not to go on a Literary Walk through Paris and which ‘Author in Conversation’ event to pick. In the end, the choice fell on two events:
“Reading Around the World” on Friday, 20^th. and “In Conversation with Salman Rushdie” on Sunday, 22^nd.

            “Reading Around the World” featured eight different writers from as many countries, all of them reading excerpts from their latest work in their mother tongues, while the audience could follow along reading either the French or English translation. Thus we got a chance to listen to very different languages, from Chinese to Hebrew to Turkish. We also got a chance to discover new authors we’d never heard (or at least never read) before, and re-discover authors we already loved in a line-up featuring Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, John Banville, David Grossman, Ma Jian, Salman Rushdie, Elif Shafak, Antonio Skármeta, and Ahdaf Soueif. All this took place in the wonderful courtyard of the Centre Culture Irlandaise on a warm September evening. Almost too god to be true.

            Two evenings later, I and two friends went to the Louvre Auditorium to listen to Salman Rushdie reading from and talking about his autobiography Joseph Anton. One topic of the conversation was of course the Fatwah and Rushdie’s years spent in police protection – the main topic of the book. In this conversation, Rushdie turned out to be a very likeable and funny person, who’d come through the darker years of his life without bitterness. He’s not too fond of organized religion, but who’d really criticize him for that?

            Joseph Anton (titled after the pseudonym he used during his years in hiding, a combination of Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov) is a book I am definitely going to read – as soon as I have worked through the reading lists for my courses.

After the three days in Paris, the Festival moved on to Lyon, for two more days of literary awesomeness. For literature students Paris is definitely turning out to be the perfect city. If you want literature, it’s just around the corner. And even though Paris is a huge city (and a capital city nonetheless), prices for events like this are usually low (the two events we went to cost €5 for students, people under 26, the elderly, and people out of work, and €10 for everyone else).
It will be hard leaving Paris after having gotten used to this.