Posted by: Alexander McCall Smith - Author of The Good Husband of Zebra Drive

We left Alexander McCall Smith last week in Sri Lanka—this week we’re catching up with him at the Galle Literary Festival.

The Galle Literary Festival was founded by a very good man called Geoffrey Dobbs. Geoffrey spent much of his business career in Hong Kong before he ended up in Sri Lanka, where he set up a number of hotels. When the tsunami hit Sri Lanka he devoted a great deal of his time and energy to setting up a charity to help get the Galle region back on its feet, and he has done great and good work in that respect. He has been tireless in working for the benefit of people who lost everything in that disaster, and he is much appreciated in the country as a result.

But he is not one to sit about and, as well as being one of the inventors of the new sport of elephant polo, he decided that a literary festival would not only draw visitors to the region and help out in that way but that it would add substantially to the cultural life of Sri Lanka. And it has done exactly that. It is one of the most enjoyable literary festivals I have ever attended and I can thoroughly recommend to anybody who wants to spend a holiday in that part of the world to go to the festival as part of the trip. The next one will be in January 2009: details will be available on their website.

Who was there? As well as major figures from Sri Lanka, which has a lively literary tradition, international visitors included Gore Vidal, William Dalrymple (a friend of mine who writes books on Indian history) and Vikram Seth (with whom I share an editor in London). There were several remarkable parties and—this being a very important feature of the festival—a number of lunches and dinners where readers could choose to sit down to a meal with the writer of their choice. Those were wonderful, as they gave everybody a chance to meet a writer whose work they were interested in. I had an extremely enjoyable dinner attended by about sixty people, where I was able to speak personally to everybody and where we were treated to a superb meal by a famous Australian chef.