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garden party at the Antonio Blanco's Renaissance Museum featuring music performances marked the end of this year's Ubud Writers and Readers Festival on Sunday night.

Attendees at the closing party enjoyed the performance of students from state high school SMA 1 Ubud playing Balinese gamelan and performing a choir.

They played several foreign and Indonesian songs in collaboration with an ensemble group from Al-Izhar High School of Jakarta. The Saharaja Band concluded the stage performance.

Despite a 60-percent decrease in the number of sponsorships, coupled with the global economic downturn and the July bombings of JW Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels in Jakarta, the four-day literary festival this year was a marvellous success, according to the organizing committee.

There was apparently an increase in the number of participants, as well as in the involvement of Indonesian writers in this year's festival, themed Compassion and Solidarity.

Literary critic Melani Budianta, who chaired some of the festival's discussions, said the event was disorganized compared to last year's, citing cancelled sessions and a changed schedule.

"In some discussions, there was mismatch between themes and speakers. The organizers should have better considered the selection of speakers and themes."

However, she acknowledged that this year's festival had managed to engage more Indonesian writers.

The last day of the festival saw much-anticipated special events, particularly the sold-out ticketed Literary Lunch session with Fatima Bhutto, niece of the assassinated former Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

The author of Whispers of the Desert shared her colorful life as a writer, journalist, politician-in-training and heir-apparent to Benazir's throne during a talk with journalist-cum-writer Desi Anwar.

In an evening session titled "Into the Muse: where poetry merges with melody", literary enthusiasts explored the soulful sounds of Daphne Tse's musical creations interspersed with the poetic musings of multi-faceted artist John O'Sullivan.

Three books were launched on the last day of the festival.

Bocah Muslim di Negeri James Bond (A Muslim Boy in James Bond's Country), the Indonesian translation of Unimagined authored by Imran Ahmad, was about a Pakistan-born Muslim boy who moves to London and grows up torn between his Islamic identity and his desire to embrace the West.