In the UK, people are going nuts over literary festivals.

The literary festival scene is undergoing a boom akin to that in the music industry, with new events mushrooming around the country to compete with venerable annual showcases like Hay-on-Wye, Oxford and Cheltenham.

From the revelation that London’s South Bank Centre is to hold its first literary festival, attended by figures as diverse as the Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka and the children’s author Lauren Child, to the unveiling of new events all over the UK, there are now more than 100 jamborees for the prose and poetry-obsessed every year.

While thousands will flock to the 450 music festivals in Britain this summer, contributing an estimated £500m to the economy, it seems there is a similar thirst for dub poets and multimedia memorials to literary greats.

This sounds healthy.