A Series of Unfortunate Lit Fest Events

A seasoned speaker spills the tea on lit fest fiascos, from managing venue mix-ups to indulging writers' whims

- Rahul Jacob

Imagine a literary festival not as encounters with favourite authors or listening to fascinating debates but instead as embarrassing onstage debacles, serialised episodes of misadventures that metamorphose in the mind into a very public pillorying. With this season's calendar of lit fests, in locations as diverse as Jaipur and Thimphu, coming to an end, my bizarre experiences at Sri Lanka's Galle Literary Festival last month reminded me of my accident-prone run on stage.

Consider my first invitation to moderate a panel for the Hong Kong Literary Festival in March 2003. The festival was held amid reports from southern China of a new, often deadly, virus. Within a couple of weeks of the festival, Hong Kong itself was reeling from the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS. One of the authors who pulled out was an obscure Turkish writer on the panel I was moderating. On the same panel was a British writer whose work had been part of what is referred to as AIDS denialism in the 1990s. A series of articles for The Sunday Times, of which Neville Hodgkinson was the science editor, had argued that the AIDS epidemic in Africa was a myth and that antiviral treatments were ineffective.

Staring at what remained of the lineup the evening before, I wondered whether the panel was an elaborate prank. But the grim reality the next morning was worse than I had catastrophised.