Arab writers are enjoying greater freedom of expression, a Saudi female author said on Saturday, four years after a novel she wrote about the private lives of women caused controversy in her native Saudi Arabia.
Dubai's first-ever literary festival opened on Thursday after sparking an international row over censorship when a romantic novel by Britain's Geraldine Bedell and featuring a gay sheikh, was turned down by the organisers.
"We are moving towards more freedom of speech in my country and in the Arab World. I look at the positive side and I see the huge difference," Rajaa al-Sane told a panel discussion on censorship at the festival in Dubai.
"The Girls of Riyadh" stirred a controversy when Sane first published it in Beirut in 2005 because it delved into the lives of women in Riyadh's ultra-conservative society.
The book "was a huge step that led other authors in Saudi Arabia to further freedom of speech", she said, adding that 60 other novels tackling thorny issues have been published in Saudi Arabia since then.
"The Internet has a huge impact on freedom of speech in Saudi ... Censorship is something that we can avoid (through the Internet)" and "by publishing abroad ... everyone in Saudi is eager for this new" freedom of expression, she added.
Such freedom is one of the issues the Gulf Arab region, which has witnessed an oil-fuelled economic boom, has been faced with recently, especially given that the area is host to a large expatriate populations.
In Dubai, for example, foreigners make up more than 80 percent of the population.
Canadian Booker-prize winner Margaret Atwood, who is vice president of PEN, the literary anti-censorship organisation that is hosting the debate, initially pulled out of the festival in protest over the alleged rejection of Bedell's novel.
She later retracted her decision, which she said she regretted as she took it based on the belief Bedell's book had been banned.