African Writers need higher profile

Australia's Adelaide Writers' Week has long been acknowledged for the quality and diversity of its invited writers, encountered in the shade of tents and plane trees where an amiable late-summer mood prevails. Here readers mingle with some of the world's most distinguished literary figures in a meeting place between a memorial garden for women and a colonial parade ground


Having just been a guest at Writers Week, I can report that it was an exceptionally good festival for everyone involved - booksellers, readers, writers and publishers. There was only one aspect that concerned me and that was the very small number of writers from Africa. The number was two. Lyndall Gordon (South Africa)and Abdulrazak Gurnah (Tanzania). When it came to the Middle-East the number was even smaller - zero. Some could argue that Robert Fisk corrected the inbalance as he lives in Beruit but he is listed as coming from the UK.

Given the global importance of events in both Africa and the Middle-East it seems peculiar that an effort was not made to address those issues. However there was a feeling that journalistic writing was somehow not literature - a view expressed by an audience member during a panel session I was on with Robert Fisk and American Mark Danner.

There might have been three Africans if the great JM Coetzee (pictured left) had been speaking.

He did turn up but only to go through a ceremony that made him an Australian citizen. For the record, here is a list of the foreign writers at the festival.

Simon Armitage (UK) Olivier Barrot (France) John Berendt (USA) Michael Cunningham (USA) Mark Danner (USA) Shashi Deshpande (India) Patricia Duncker (UK) Robert Fisk (UK) Patrick Gale (UK) Lyndall Gordon (South Africa) Abdulrazak Gurnah (Tanzania) Bettany Hughes (UK) Moses Isegawa (Netherlands) Tim Krabbe (Netherlands) Tessa de Loo (Netherlands) Val McDermid (UK) Suketa Mehta (India) Vincent O'Sullivan (NZ) Ben Rice (UK) Vikram Seth (India) Nicholas Spice (UK) Andrew Taylor (UK) Minette Walters (UK) Sarah Waters (UK) Ronald Wright (Canada)

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