Festivals

International literature festivals are a surprisingly big business. As Gisèle Sapiro points out in this chapter, there are now more than 450 such festivals in the English-speaking world alone, and some of them draw paying audiences in the hundreds of thousands. Unlike readings, which traditionally take place in independent bookshops or university auditoria, and which thus benefit from only modest publicity campaigns, literature festivals provide heavily promoted venues in which readers can meet their favourite authors (or at least see them from a distance). Their importance for the construction of world authorship is thus undeniable, even though they have received less critical attention than, for example, translators or global publishing houses. This chapter offers a sociological analysis of these festivals and demonstrates how they all too often perpetuate many of the well-known inequalities of the world literary system.