The Parati festival: a novel idea

As well as attracting global literary luminaries to the shores of tropical Brazil, the Parati festival is a big hit with the locals. Boyd Tonkin is impressed

It was the living statue that showed me how big the Parati festival has grown. Read about this already-legendary writers' festival in the British press and you pick up the impression of a handful of parachuted global luminaries - Salman Rushdie or Margaret Atwood one year, Ian McEwan or Don DeLillo the next - cosily chatting on the cute shores of tropical Brazil: sort of the Groucho Club gets Lost.

Well, there wasn't much cosiness as Christopher Hitchens wound up a 2,000-plus audience spread across two enormous tents by telling them not to be so "fucking sure" that Hizbollah spoke for the Arab masses.

Clearly, nobody had told the horde of raucous teens who partied late into Saturday night after a free gig by local funky-folkie band Ciranda Electrica that this was supposed to be an élite gathering of posh Anglo intellectuals. And, yes, there outside the old slaves' church of Nossa Senhora do Rosario, a ghostly white-gowned figure stood and barely moved - unlike the over-eager, ever-hopeful poets who pressed slim volumes on the evening crowds that milled among the cake stalls that fill Parati's famously uneven cobbled lanes.

So the familiar curse of Edinburgh streets in August had even made it to Brazil, to the former gold-shipping port turned resort on the Costa Verde, 150 miles south of Rio. In three years, Parati's festival of literature - FLIP, in its Portuguese acronym - has made itself a reputation as a magnet not just for major writers, but for a growing fringe of arts events from theatre to music, and crafts to cuisine.

Liz Calder, founder of Bloomsbury Publishing and a Parati home-owner since 1999, co-created FLIP in 2003, motivated by "our belief that the riches of Brazil's art and literature - not to mention its natural beauty - are not sufficiently appreciated in the rest of world". Each year since has seen that appreciation sprout as fast as the flora in the forests all around. In terms of festival ecology, Parati has enjoyed a spectacularly accelerated development. Such a boom can bring grief as well as glory. Yet, unusually, FLIP and its friends seem to know just the course they want to steer.

Much of the truth about Parati matches the hype. Visiting luminaries? This month, Toni Morrison came as FLIP's first Nobel Prize winner, movingly connecting her fiction with the tragedies of US history and reflecting on her troubled American identity: "It is my country, and it is precisely because it is that my frustration, my anger and - I have to say - my shame is so paramount".

Meanwhile, Hitchens and Tariq Ali outraged or delighted their fans or foes with political polemic sharpened by events in Lebanon. Edmund White and Nicole Krauss chewed over the relationship between memoir and fiction; Jonathan Safran Foer and Ali Smith disclosed the dark secrets of the novelist; and Philip Gourevitch and New Yorker magazine doyenne Lillian Ross discussed one of this year's themes - the art of creative reportage.

Beautiful surroundings? Parati's bay boasts 65 islands, while the BR-101 from Rio to Santos between sands and woods surely trounces all rivals as the loveliest coastal highway.

Fascinating local hosts? Well, Dom Joao de Orleans e Braganca threw a lunch party in his antiques-filled seafront house. If Brazil still had an emperor (as it did between the end of Portuguese rule in 1822 and 1889), then he might well be it. As it is, he works as a - pretty accomplished - wildlife photographer, with a book of his own to launch.

But the truly noble pedigree of FLIP and its offshoots emerges in their determination to evolve as a people's festival that runs in harmony with the town and its precious - and increasingly vulnerable - environment. It's a popular festival in the simple sense that huge crowds arrive to hear authors from Brazil and other lands (this year, they included Peru, France, Algeria and Nigeria) as well as stars from the Anglo-American firmament.

The two principal tents, one for live events and the other for a cheaper TV relay, standing on either side of the river Pereque-Acu, are the work of the Sao Paulo architect and FLIP director Mauro Munhoz. As stylish and practical venues, complete with café, souvenir stall and bookshop that stocks everything from Brazilian classics to O Chef Sem Misterios by one Jamie Oliver, they make the marquees of Hay or Edinburgh look rather, well, Third World.

FLIP has worked hard to put down lasting roots in its community. The papier-mâché children's favourites on the main square - from Asterix to Jack and the Giant and the Little Prince - are only the most colourful signs of an educational project that reaches 90 per cent of local schools and 7,000 pupils. Thanks to this "Cirandas de Parati" programme, every telegraph pole in the old town sports candy-striped ribbons, and many carry a placard with a tantalising extract from a book. As Liz Calder said: "I know of nowhere where the combination of books and children has produced such a dazzling transformation". The streets throng with smartly turned-out kids on their way to events in a special children's tent. And the authors make contact too: Benjamin Zephaniah was there to run a workshop.

FLIP has also tapped into the Brazilian talent for straddling the often deceptive borders between "high" and "mass" culture. As the programme director Ruth Lanna puts it, such a festival should join "incompatible ideas": the "collective joy of public celebration" with the "individual quietness of artistic creation".

Getting into this boundary-busting Brazilian spirit, Ali Smith raved about a fringe gig featuring the virtuoso clarinettist Paulo Moura: "I've never seen imagination in action in the way that I did when I watched him."

This month's events showcased the fiction of Jorge Amado (1912-2001), the rumbustious champion of Afro-Brazilian folkways and festivals, whose carnivalesque novels made him a popular hero as well as a literary pioneer. A display of its Amado coverage by the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo summarised this flair for cultural fusion; a 1992 headline was "Caetano 50, Jorge 80". Amado shared a birthday with another favourite son of Bahia, the singer, composer and poet Caetano Veloso.

It was Veloso's superstar sister Maria Bethania who opened the festival with a rapturously-received concert that had the people singing along with a 60-year-old diva who somehow combines the voice and presence of Nina Simone and Dusty Springfield with maybe a touch of a silver-maned Janis Joplin. Bethania read from Amado between songs, paying tribute to a writer whom she knew: "He was magic to me, loving; he used to say things that challenged me and made me think."

Whether they came for music, poetry or politics, visitors to FLIP packed the grid of Parati's old town almost to bursting point. In one respect, this is part of the plan. Calder and her associates originally aimed "to help the town prosper during the off-season". For their first three years, that meant dampish, midwinter July skies; this time, a month's delay to avoid a clash with the World Cup resulted in a festival blessed by blue days and fresh nights.

So the streets heaved, and the worry arose that FLIP might prove too much of a good thing for a place that Calder, when she lived in 1960s Sao Paulo, knew by repute as "a secret place of wonderful architecture and natural beauty". The secret is now out, but FLIP's organisers at the Associacao Casa Azul intend to fit the festival into a year-round project of sustainable development. Calder argues: "Yes, Parati needs more tourists, but they should be tourists who are sensitive not only to its beauty but also the fragility of that beauty."

For now, that beauty remains pretty much intact. The drive to keep it that way will be a story much longer than the one we often hear in Britain about flying visits by celebrity authors. And it will take all the "imagination in action" that Ali Smith found so inspiring.