Gulf News (Dubai)

Getting it write
A group of creative writers plans to put Dubai on the literary map. Piers Grimley Evans attends its first meeting

By Piers Grimley Evans
March 18, 2005

"...The task the editor had set him was tough. Creative writers? In Dubai? It would be like scouring the Empty Quarter for Cheddar cheese.

Fiction was the one area where the city was still playing catchup. Dublin, Mumbai and Kolkata may all have been immortalised in print, but Dubai was still stranded in reality.

Setting aside a dodgy seventies blockbuster, the novel to define Dubai has yet to be written.

Still, an internet search revealed that a thriving Dubai Writers Meetup Group (writers.meetup. com/293) had suddenly popped up in cyberspace.

Now he was on his way to meet its members at the City Centre shopping mall..."

"...The first meeting of Sophie’s group was set for a Tuesday evening in late February at the Irish Village, an eerily authentic recreation of rural Ireland in the heart of the city.

It was to be an example of the internet converting a virtual community into a real one.

But never having seen this done, by seven o’clock he sat at a long empty table with a definite twinge of anxiety.

Within a few minutes, however, the first three twenty-somethings arrived.

After brief introductions they started up an unsteady conversation fractured by frequent nervous glances across the table.

Their faces all expressed the same unspoken thought, “Are we the only people who are going to turn up?”

And, he suspected, “Are we really going to have to spend all evening talking to this chap from Friday?”

To his relief, by 8 o’clock, 20 designers, PR people, academics and media folk, representing most of the UAE’s expat communities, had squeezed around the benches.

He circled around them picking up their perspectives on literature..."

"...As darkness fell and discussion grew livelier, it was clear that the city now had at least one place where writing fiction was no longer eccentric..."

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