Jamaica literary festival draws top-flight authors

Best-selling authors take to a seaside stage, bottles of Red Stripe beer in hand.
Budding writers line up to read their works to a big, appreciative audience. Book-loving islanders and tourists mingle with literary luminaries as the sun sets over the Caribbean Sea.
It's the Calabash International Literary Festival Jamaica's unique, spirited take on the world of literary gatherings, and the biennial event held over the weekend has been getting bigger at each staging.
Since 2001, the tiny, laid-back beach town of Treasure Beach in arid southern Jamaica has hosted the festival, attracting Nobel laureates and a slew of other acclaimed writers. From modest beginnings, Calabash has grown into a major international literary event.

One of its three founders, Jamaican novelist Colin Channer, described the three-day celebration of writing as the "greatest little festival in the greatest little district in the greatest little country in the world."
This year, authors Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith and Jamaica Kincaid were among the novelists and poets participating in readings and themed discussions in between reggae- and rap-fueled celebrations and beachside socialising.

The festival, free of charge and open to anyone, started Friday and ran through yesterday evening.
Kincaid, an Antigua-born novelist and essayist, said the festival has given the people of the Caribbean a top-flight literary event in a part of the world where storytelling and creativity with language has always been prized.

"Among all the other things we do, black people also make literature. We are very imaginative, literate people. The problem has always been access. That's why this event is so inspiring," she said by the saltwater pool at Jake's Hotel, a collection of funky, colourful cottages that hosts the celebration every two years.
Rushdie said Calabash has steadily earned a name as a festival of choice for some of the world's most gifted authors.