The festival each year brings together literary giants and tyros for a two-week celebration of the written word and the art of story-telling. During this fortnight, the audiences have heard writers of fiction, political memoirs and adventure -- from Booker-winner Ian McEwan and former South African president F W De Klerk to mountaineer Edmund Hillary.

The final morning began with one of India's newest contributions to English language fiction, Raj Kamal Jha, reading from his first novel, The Blue Bedspread, before an audience which included Salman Rushdie and Anita Desai. The novel has been described as ``something remarkable, almost a coming ofage of the Indian novel'' by John Fowles, author of The French Lieutenant's Woman. Copies of the book at the festival shop were quickly sold out. Among those who filled the seats was a person who had last week heard Jha read extracts from his book in Manchester and had travelled the 200-odd miles to hear him again.

Jha shared the stage with Anita Desai who read from Fasting Feasting, which was published last year. In neat tones she described the disturbing minutiae of ordinary lives, caught up in ordinary things and apparently ordinary indifferences. The tragi-comedy of middle class existence, which is Desai's forte, provoked laughter after the absorbed silence that greeted Jha's bleak and disturbing tale.

The star performer, as always, was Salman Rushdie. Political controversy, strict security, and a writer who clearly loves his own stories are big crowd-pullers. Reading from his new novel, Ground Beneath Her Feet, he displayed an enjoyment that comes from familiarity, from retellinga good story over and over again, changing voices and accents and drawing willing listeners into the drama. After the reading, Rushdie spoke of pop music -- the cohering theme of his book -- as the music of his generation, music ``for young people by young people'' which crossed borders and continents effortlessly.

Asked what he had meant when he said recently that he felt ``betrayed by India'', Rushdie said there were many things, including problems with obtaining an India visa, the response to Satanic Verses, which was first banned in India, and what he described as ``rude noises'' coming in his direction from India. He said ``I felt disappointed that the work I had done counted for so little in India.'' He, however, added: ``I hope this period is at an end, India is a place of colossal importance to me and I hope the rift can be bridged.'' Rain seemed determined to drown out Vikram Seth's effort to acquaint us with his muses and his very English character in An Equal Music. Rain drummed onthe taut white top of the white tent as he acknowledged Pushkin, whose Eugene Onegin was published 200 years ago today, as his literary mentor. As the rain let up, Seth spoke of Michael, his protagonist in An Equal Music, following him down Regent Street in a bus as he finds the music he seeks, but loses, again, his love.

An Equal Music is in many ways a very ``English'' novel. Asked why he shifted context so dramatically from India to England, Seth said he had no control on his muse and that in may ways to him ``rural India is more alien than the north of England''.