Isobel Abulhoul moved to Dubai in 1968 and began her career as a primary school teacher, before founding Al Ittihad School with her husband. Not satisfied with that achievement, she went on to launch Magrudy’s, one of Dubai’s biggest bookstore chains, before establishing the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature in 2008 — now the biggest event of its kind in the region. Then in 2012, Isobel, who is also founder of Jerboa book publishers, was awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in recognition of her years of service to education and British literature in the UAE.
“…she said why didn’t I pitch this?… so I did, having never been to a literary festival in my life and having no real idea of what the undertaking would be. But I pitched it and Emirates accepted it…”
My passion for literature and sharing my love of books
My passion for literature started when I was a very little child. My parents were avid readers and used to read to my brother and me every bedtime. Very soon I got caught up in becoming a total bookworm. I loved reading from a very young age, so books have always been an important part of my life.
And then I just kept reading. English Literature was my favourite A-Level and I went on to become a teacher when I first came to Dubai. It was at an infant school so there were little children and then I had my own children and started the same process of reading to them. (I’ve got five children, so I’ve had plenty of practice!)
Setting up a not-for-profit school and Magrudy’s educational toy shop
Then I was involved in setting up a not-for-profit school. I realised once it was done that there was nowhere you could buy educational toys, so I decided to co-found an educational toy shop with my husband. This was in 1975 and I’d had two children by that stage. (I arrived in 1968.)
We set up Magrudy’s, but from the very beginning I always assumed, because I had no business background, that you would sell children’s books in a toy shop, but in those days you didn’t. Retail was very segregated. Across the world, books were in a bookshop and toys were in a toyshop and groceries were in a grocer’s shop or a supermarket. But I didn’t have those boundaries because Dubai is a place where there are no boundaries really, so you can just follow your own path and your own dream.
So, we opened Magrudy’s and it was an educational toy shop with children’s books, but very soon I added mother and baby books to the children’s books and then we had fiction books and non-fiction books. It grew and grew until a few years later we opened the first dedicated bookshop and books became the major part of our business.
We invested in software that allowed us to be able to access the Nielsen database with 3.5 million titles (or probably more now) that are in print. So we could access any book in print in English anywhere in the world and we developed ways of bringing books in, so we were able to offer a customer ordering service. It just kept growing.
It was like being a child and waking up in a toyshop, but for me that toyshop would be a bookshop. Every day I’d be going to work and there I was with all these wonderful books. How lucky was I to be able to work in something that was such a passion for me?
Background to setting up the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature
I got involved in setting up a radio programme called “Talking of Books”, where we would have guests on and we would interview the authors, so my passion for reading lead to developing a bit of a style for how you would be on the radio. I do like radio. It is a wonderful medium.
I later organised a ladies literary lunch with writers and illustrators and people interested in literature. Whilst I was in the office doing the last minute preparations for the lunch before I went home, Bill Samuels, who is the nephew of Christina Foyle of Foyles bookshop, was passing through Dubai on his way to India. A fellow bookseller, he popped in to say hello and have a coffee and the person who was his travelling companion asked me, “Does Dubai have a literary festival?” And I said, “No.” Bill and I got talking about how wonderful it would be to have a literary festival. Anyway, just a conversation.
I went to the literary lunch and one of the guests said to me as she was leaving, “This is the sort of thing that Christina Foyle used to do; she was famous for having these literary lunches with authors.” And I said it was funny she should say that as I had been speaking with Christina’s nephew just a bit earlier and as part of the conversation I happened to mentioned that we had talked about how Dubai didn’t have a literature festival and what a good idea it would be.
Two days later I had a thank-you letter from her and she said why didn’t I pitch this to Emirates? So I did, having never been to a literary festival in my life and having no real idea of what the undertaking would be. But I pitched it and Emirates accepted it, so we had the wherewithal to ‘press go’.
It was very lucky that I had had all those years of being a bookseller because I knew what was popular, I knew the publishers and I had all the contacts to get in touch with authors. I had also built up some business knowledge through my experience – how to run a business, all the issues of funding it and cash flow and all of that.
So I had that in the kitty and looking back, it was probably a good idea. I had never been to a literary festival before founding this one in Dubai because it meant that I didn’t have any preconceived ideas and I could allow the Dubai flavour to inhabit the festival.
Dubai’s culture – a very definite culture of its own
From when I first arrived in 1968, Dubai has always had a very definite culture of its own, which has a long history. It is tied up very much with the Arabic language, so for non-Arabic speakers it’s harder for them to tap into it and to understand the relevance of culture within their lives. With having such a huge expatriate population it is much more difficult nowadays than it was when I first arrived to get within that specific culture.
Although I do think the literary festival has been a great way of opening that door, because we have a lot of Emirati writers, we have simultaneous translation between Arabic and English in all the sessions, so you can go to any session. You don’t need to be an Arabic speaker but you do still understand it and vice-versa if you went into an English session, you would have the translation in Arabic.
So from the very beginning, we thought that was an important factor, to open a door and to build bridges between cultures, because Dubai is so multicultural and we always felt it was important to reflect that in the programme of the literary festival.
Festival attendees over the years
In our first year, the late great Frank McCourt (‘Angela’s Ashes’) was an absolutely wonderful speaker. It was the last festival he went to. We had Chimamanda Adichie, the Nigerian writer in the first year and she’s coming back this year. We’ve had Michael Palin, we’ve had Michael Morpurgo, Tony Ross, Lauren Child (‘Charlie and Lola’), Joanne Harris (‘Chocolat’) and we’ve had Anthony Horowitz. We have had a huge number of authors of all nationalities through the doors of the festival over the six and a half years of its existence.
Recognition for the festival
The last two years, 2013 and 2014, the Festival has won the ‘Best Festival in the Middle East’ Award against stiff competition from across the Middle East. I think that for our festival, the award has been given to us not because we are the glitziest or the brightest or have the most stars. It is because the festival is life-changing in many ways and it is totally engaged within the community of Dubai and the region and we are bringing in whole families, so everything about it has an innately good feel, genuinely happy.
The importance of improving literacy and fostering children’s love of books
We’ve all been children and I just ask people to remember what the first book they read for pleasure was. Now some children never read for pleasure and they grow up into adults who don’t read, so their experience of books might be when they go to school. It’s about learning; it’s like eating your Brussels sprouts. I don’t want children to feel like that about books. I want them to feel what I feel, still today.
But that door was opened for me when I was a child, thank goodness, by my parents. So, what we think is, the younger the child, the easier it is to turn someone from a non-reader into a reader, by bringing a whole load of authors out here and letting those children be inspired by the excitement, by the buzz, by the celebration.
We have so many success stories where we get letters from schools, from colleges, from parents saying, “Coming to the festival is the best thing that’s ever happened to my child. My child now reads avidly for pleasure”.
Electronic books versus hard-copy books
I think they’re two different animals. I have a Kindle, which I love because I can get a book instantly and if I’m travelling it’s a very lightweight way of taking lots of books with me and I never run out, so that’s great. But I also do like the physical book. There are particular books that I just don’t think translate into Ebooks.
Like cookbooks – I’m sorry, but I love my cookbooks. I love the fact that they’re splattered with experiences of being used for cooking by not just me, but by the whole family, so you have these cookbooks that have memories with them. You can open them up. You can see which have been your favourite recipes. Sometimes people scribble on them. That’s lovely.
Children’s books, those baby books – we’re not going to be reading an Ebook to a child. They want to feel it. They want to suck it. They want to tear it. OK, we try to teach them not to, but that’s all part of the process of growing up. So I do not see that those books, those physical books will ever be replaced by an Ebook.
I know you can do wonderful things with iPads. I’m absolutely in favour of all technology because we have to embrace technology, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t also appreciate and love physical books.
Getting involved in the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature
Your readers can get involved by going onto the website www.emirateslitfest.com. They can find out about what’s happening at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature between the 3rd and the 7th of March this year. They can see the list of authors. The programme has been uploaded so they can see what’s going on and when. We hope we will be able to put some special deals on the programme, so if people want to fly in, there will be that opportunity.
Not forgetting that the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature is part of the Emirates Literature Foundation and we have just opened in November the Dubai International Writers’ Centre (DIWC).
For anyone who’s travelling to this part of the world, check out the programme at the DIWC, because what that does is allow us to have year-round sessions, so we’re not just limited to five days of the year.
Details of the 2015 Festival
The first programme comes out on 8th January 2015. We have a party for Festival Friends and they get a first look at the programme. The programme will go online, but unless you’re a Festival Friend, you can’t buy a ticket for another week, so you just have to wait.
In terms of authors, we’ve got David Walliams, Julia Donaldson and Michael Morpurgo. We’ve got David Mitchell (‘Cloud Atlas’), Jung Chang and Marcus Zusak (‘The Book Thief’). We have Simon Singh, who will take a mathematical look at The Simpsons. Bettany Hughes, the historian; Dame Jenni Murray of Women’s Hour fame. We’ve got a huge, eclectic mix of authors coming, and obviously lots of authors from different parts of the world.
The great thing about our festival is when you come, you may know all of the authors from your own country. You may not know much about authors from other countries and this is the joy. You start discovering new writers that you possibly would never read unless you came to a festival like ours.
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