With three separate TV channels there (al-Jazeera, PalMedia and TV Palestine) the Kamal Nasser Hall in Birzeit University, Ramallah, was packed for Thursday morning’s event. Victoria Brittain warned the room that there were to be no jokes in her reading, from Enemy Combatant – the book she co-authored with Moazzam Begg about his incarceration in Guantanamo. This was followed by Pankaj Mishra’s reading which carefully and astutely took in racial tensions between India and Pakistan and Ahdaf Soueif’s text which addressed British colonialism in Egypt. Hanan al-Shaykh’s readings always have the audience laughing and today was no exception. Mourid Barghouti showed again why he is such an important voice in the Arab world.

After the event the authors dispersed to take eight separate workshops with students. Among them Roddy Doyle and Ian Jack discussed ‘The role of fiction in creating new political realities’ while Andrew O’Hagan and Nathalie Handal were grilled over topics ranging from the use of body language in poetry to T.S. Eliot’s intertextuality by a group of razor-sharp girls.

This was followed by a meeting with 20 of the top Palestinian authors, all gathered together at the Qattan foundation.

The evening’s event saw another full house at Ramallah’s Kasaba Theatre. Mahmoud Darwish, unable to attend, sent a moving letter of welcome to the Festival, which was read out by Tania Nasser. Then, first to the stage was Ahdaf Soueif, Suheir Hammad and Mourid Barghouti. The crowd whistled and cheered at every mention of Soueif’s name but those who hadn’t heard Suheir Hammad perform before won’t forget her anytime soon. With her mix of Brooklyn and Gaza, hip-hop and Arabic the Palestinian-American’s poems blew the roof off. Mourid Barghouti, calm and commanding as always, then took the discussion to the role of the poet and asserted, as is the objective of the Festival, the power of culture over the culture of power.

Next up were Esther Freud, William Dalrymple and Roddy Doyle. Dalrymple, enthusiastic, eloquent and informed as always, read from City of Djinns while Esther Freud’s account of her childhood relationship with her mother’s Moroccan boyfriend was measured and touching. Roddy Doyle stepped up to the podium with a copy of A Star Called Henry for his reading. His character’s account of his own birth had the audience whooping with laughter and throughout the Q&A session hardly a minute went by without his dry comparisons of Ireland and Palestine setting them off again. The culmination came with a question from the back as a woman asked him if his choice of reading was influenced by the fact that it was his birthday today! The audience burst into ‘Happy Birthday’ before Roddy expressed his disappointment that all the adverts on the drive to Jerusalem for ‘60’ had got his age wrong by a whole decade….