In Cartagena the talk is of Farc and fatwas

It’s hot, humid and yet a sea breeze blows down the narrow streets to flutter the table cloths of the pavement cafes. Cartagena is on the Caribbean coast of Colombia. Yellow, pink, white, blue houses compete for a ringside seat in this packed town. It’s a natural enough place to have a book festival. There are many writers with houses here, not least Garcia Marquez.

This morning I did a journalism workshop with 60 teenaged Colombians whose command of English was so good they could think in it. Every one of them was on Facebook. None of them reads a paper or watches television news. They have a disconnected view of the world. Gaza is a small issue to them. Obama a bigger phenomenon. And the guerrilla Farc force an even bigger issue.

But the discussion was fascinating. They were very concerned to know how Colombia is seen in the UK. Not at all, I had to venture, and if it is, it’s about coffee and drugs – although the successful release of Ms Betancourt from years of confinement by the Farc has changed perceptions a bit, I ventured.

Salman Rushdie arrived today. He’s done some online interviews before coming here. He was asked by one Colombian journalist whether any of his writings about Islam had ever got him into a bit of bother. Well, he replied, only a little: a 10-year death fatwa from Iran.

You realize we are very removed from each other, we Brits and Colombians. Tomorrow I have to do a talk and chair a late fixture, a round table about Updike, with Martin Amis and a Latin American writer.

Off down the cobbled streets to an artist I know who’s having a dinner for Amis, his wife, and some Colombian writers. A good chance to try to peer inside the community here.

Benjamin Zephaniah has been doing poetry in a poor barrio today. The Spanish translator told the impoverished people in the crowd that someone had written to Mr Z to tell him that she had committed suicide after reading his poems. Talk about “lost in translation”. What the translation should have said was that she had been saved from suicide after reading his poems! Everyone seems to have taken it in their stride.