“Booking” your holiday has taken on a whole new meaning over the past few years, as thousands of “bookworm tourists” follow the international literary festival trail.
Literary festivals are springing up across the globe in destinations as varied as Jordan and Brazil, attracting visitors keen to see and hear the likes of V. S. Naipaul, Germaine Greer and Salman Rushdie.
In the UK, festivals in Cheltenham, Hay-on-Wye, Durham, Bath, Oxford, Southwold, Hull and Ilkley — among many others — are proving a boon to local hotels and restaurants, with rooms often booked a year in advance and restaurants packed with high-spending literary bon vivants.
According to VisitBritain, the UK tourist board, 57 per cent of overseas visitors are now “influenced to choose a holiday because of something they have read in a book”.
Some readings for the Cheltenham Literature Festival, on October 6-15, which is sponsored by The Times, are already sold out. This year’s line-up includes John Grisham, Jeremy Paxman, Marina Lewycka and Simon Schama. Travel writers include Robin Hanbury-Tenison, Dervla Murphy, Howard Marks and Colin Thubron.
Advertisement
Matthew Wilkins, of Cheltenham Tourist Information Centre, said: “After the Cheltenham race meetings, this is the busiest time of year for us.”
One of the most impressive line-ups at a foreign festival this year is at the Majestic Petra Festival in Petra, Jordan, in December, with Vikram Seth, Blake Morrison, Martin Amis and the travel writer William Dalrymple among the speakers.
Another successful newcomer is the Festa Literária Internacional de Parati — known as “Flip” — held in Parati in Brazil each August since 2003 and set up by the well-known publisher Liz Calder, the co-founder of Bloomsbury.
She said: “People come from the UK and all over the place. In four years, numbers have doubled to more than 12,000. In Brazil it has great novelty value. It was the first literary festival in South America.”