The Fiction of truth, the truth of fiction

Once again on beautiful Bali , writers and readers from around the world gathered to share their thoughts and experiences. Read Lee Su Kim's article here .

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2009 LEE Su Kim ... Words Amidst Beauty Once again, writers and readers from around the world gathered in beautiful Bali to share their thoughts and experiences. Story and photo by  LEE SU KIM FOR FIVE DAYS last week, a gathering of writers from 25 countries discussed the great themes of our time. Censorship, colonialism, ethnicity and identity, exile, gender issues, human rights, identity, literary expression and the state, race, religion, the postcolonial voice, they were all debated at the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival in Bali, Indonesia, from October 7-11, 2009. This literary festival was conceived in 2004 by Janet De Neefe to counteract the disastrous effects of the 2002 Bali bombings that killed more than 200 people and led to dwindling tourists and a sinking economy. Since then, the festival has become “one of the six best literary festivals in the world,” according to the British magazine,  Harper’s Bazaar , and it continues t...

Sunday, October 11, 2009 KATIE JACOBS AT THE UBUD WRITERS & READERS FESTIVAL The sessions I attended on Saturday at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival left the overt political sessions behind and it was a much more literary day. "A panel on "Writing the Sub-Continent" featured Vikas Swarup, (pic left), author of Q&A, Mohammed Hanif, who also attended the Auckland Readers &Writers Festival earlier this year and is the author of "A Case of Exploding Mangoes, and Sushma Joshi, a short story writer, essayist, and documentary maker from Nepal। The first questions asked about place and sub-continent as characters within their fiction, but somewhat surprisingly, especially given the importance of place in all their works, they professed that the settings were mostly incidental, and the plot itself the only consideration." I responded to this blog: Hi Beattie, I was surprised to find your blog post and to read that the writers commented that place was no...

Carnival Lights Up Ubud Fest

After a thought provoking start to the day lunch took on a lighter note. The literary luncheon entitled ‘Dangerous Women’ was held at the stunningly beautiful Alila Ubud Resort’. Entering the resort through an expansive emerald green rice field, I immediately exhaled. A panel of passionate female authors such as the hilariously funny Shamini Flint (launching her book ‘A Bali Conspiracy’ on Sunday) and Sushma Joshi made lunch side splittingly witty and a complete joy. See the complete entry at Jo's Blog here on the Ubud Writers and Readers' Festival website.

Suka-Duka was the theme of the Ubud Writers Festival in 2009. I was on a panel about the subcontinent alongside two writers: Vikas Swarup, who wrote "Q and A", the book that was made into the Oscar winning film Slumdog Millionaire , and Pakistani writer Mohammad Hanif.