V S Naipaul dropped from Ubud Writers Festival for demanding $20,000 as appearance fee

Both V S Naipaul and Paul Theroux, who are not appearing in this year’s Ubud Festival in Bali, will appear in Jaipur Lit Fest in India and Singapore Writers Festival respectively

For this year’s festival from October 1-5, festival director Janet DeNeefe invited the American writer Paul Theroux, who had expressed interest after eating at her Ubud restaurant Indus. When she rejected his request for a fee for which, she says, “I could have got David Attenborough”, Theroux agreed instead to appear at the Singapore Writers Festival in November.
DeNeefe then invited V.S. Naipaul, the distinguished but difficult 82-year-old Trinidad-born British writer, who recently ended a long feud with Theroux. To her amazement the Wylie Agency accepted, with the promise of first- and business-class travel and a luxurious villa.