LITERARY FESTIVALS ARE BIG BUSINESS in Britain. Cynics call it book tourism, enthusiasts call it culture. No one doubts that it is a phenomenon that seems unstoppable, or that it answers to a need that is more than commercial; people can buy books anywhere, the festival allows them to be part of something bigger. It is this sense of a shared culture that is so important.

It is a little bit strange that reading, which is the most solitary and private of acts, should translate into the gospel tent euphoria of the festival. This has happened because people love to be read to, as they did when they were kids; because they are curious to meet the writers who interest them; and most of all, because they are curious to meet each other. Reader’s groups and dedicated websites are about securing the connections that books suggest. All art is about connection, and in a world that often comes to us in bewildering fragments, the connections that art offers are increasingly necessary.

I know from my own experience that whenever I do a festival, the mailing list on my website surges, and the message board gets busy. People have married, others have become lovers, others have started businesses, and found new friendships, because they have met via my books and arranged to meet in person at a festival. At Hay-on-Wye, a woman came up to me, saying that she had led a lonely life until she had nerved herself to booking an overnight room at Hay in 2000. She had made friends and founded a reading group in her home town, and a virtual reading group on the web. So festivals can do more than swell the tills of tearooms.

Festivals are discovery zones. Like speed-dating, you can have a three-minute flirt and leave if you don’t like what you hear. There is no obligation and no sense of failure. The whole shebang has a party feel, and so everyone is relaxed enough to take a few risks and step outside their own tastes and expectations.

I have been told, by the cynics, that literary festivals can operate only in rich countries with time and money to spare, so that the thing becomes a kind of cultural health farm, where you go to shed an overdose of soap operas and tone some intellectual muscle.

I thought it would be interesting to put this to the test by accepting an invitation to Brazil for the Festa Literária Internacional de Parati, a festival just three years old, in a tiny town halfway between Rio and São Paulo.

Liz Calder, the Bloomsbury supremo who discovered Salman Rushdie and J. K. Rowling, has a house outside Parati, and decided to start a literary festival there because she thought “it would be good for everything”.

She had no money, she had no backers, but she knew that Brazilians love ideas and that they are open-minded. She launched the festival, and in the first year had 800 visitors, in the second year, 12,000, yes, that nought is 12,000, and now has so many people who want to come along, that they have big-screen monitors and overflow tents.

This year, Rushdie chose to launch his new novel, Shalimar the Clown, in Portuguese, as a coup for the festival, and in recognition of what Liz Calder has achieved here. He sold every copy of his book, and most of the other writers from all over the world pretty much cleaned out their shelves.

Translations were done in four languages simultaneously, and the tents were packed all day and all night for a fantastic programme that included day-long stories for children. This is not elitist. This is not some rarefied high art — this is art for everyone, and it works.

I was invited to give a lecture on art and the environment, which I called The River of Life. We decided to include a plea to the people of Parati to fight the proposed earthworks dumping in their bay by Petrobras, Brazil’s giant oil company. The response was overwhelming, and I was asked to stay on after the festival, and address a public meeting against the “development”.

For those who think that art and activism are separate spheres, this was a moment to remember that only in the complacent Western world do we shy away from the meshing of poetry and politics. It’s not a question of subject matter — I don’t have to write books about oil companies, rather I have to remind myself and others that art opens the imagination and asks us to find solutions that are about connections, not separations. Life is a whole or it is nothing. Anyone who works with words, with paint, with music, with performance, with clay, with metal, knows this, and can pass it on.

In Parati I found huge energy, a will for change, and a sense that art was part of that change. Everything that happens happens first in our imaginations.

Festa Literária Internacional de Parati: www.flip.org.br www.jeanettewinterson.com

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