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Dubai Book Fair
The second Emirates Airline Festival of Literature’s, was held in March 2010 under the patronage of the Dubai Culture and Arts Authority, The Emirate’s dedicated authority for culture, the arts and heritage.More than twenty five thousand enthusiastic Festival-goers rubbed shoulders with 107 international, regional and local authors over the four-day Festival. It created a wonderful opportunity for UAE nationals, visitors and residents to meet their favourite writers; listen to their words and thoughts; take in the festival atmosphere and leave inspired. It featured seminars, discussions, debates and poetry readings from the world’s leading authors, as well as exciting fringe events around the Festival Centre.
The festival was also an opportunity for authors – fiction and non-fiction, commercial and literary, local and international – to encounter, explore and enrich the city’s cultural scene. The founding authors who attended in 2009 came as pioneers and left as ambassadors.
This editorial team followed closely the evolution of the festival, watching its website grow from a beta version to a professionally structured and creatively engaging design, including a strategic social media orientation with a relevant use of micro-blogging website Twitter and content rich blog featured on the website. Through regular updates, we were able to follow the different events that gathered more than 60 internationally acclaimed authors to the festival, providing a platform for Middle East authors and translators, encouraging home grown talent in Arabic and English, and creating a family friendly atmosphere with events for all ages, involving well-known children’s authors.
The festival preaches literacy creation and nurtutring as they believe strongly that literacy is the key to all knowledge, that it is a unique and exciting mode of cross-cultural communication, that imagination, innovation, and talent should be nurtured, that education should be universal, stimulating and relevant and that a wider awareness of Arabic language and culture will contribute to the future development of the region.
Saeed Al Nabouda, Chief Projects Officer, Dubai Culture & Arts Authority, said the strong community response to the festival is a testament to the rich literary culture of Dubai and how the city has served as an inspiration and support for creativ talent – both within and from around the world. “Dubai Culture took the festival to a wider audience through a series of community events, including hosting the Education Day activities at the Dubai Public Libraries, thus underlining the importance of reading and literature to the public. The Authority will continue to support such initiatives, which promote intercultural dialogue and contribute to our goal of further positioning Dubai as a vibrant, global city for culture and the arts.”
To read their press releases, click here
