Ilkley Literature Festival got off to a seriously heavyweight start on Friday night with award-winning author VS Naipaul performing the opening honours.

The festival's 'guest of honour', he appeared before a packed audience of 250 people at the King's Hall.

He read what he described as a "frivolous" passage from his latest book Half a Life. The passage described the hero of the book embarking on a sexual adventure and drew several laughs from the audience.

Afterwards he answered questions, including one about whether he took any notice of reviews of his work. He replied that he stopped reading reviews in 1957 when he read a cruel account in the New Statesman of his first novel, "which I thought was gorgeous and full of jokes, and still is".

The 69-year-old author - who was knighted in 1989 - declared himself too tired to sign copies of his book and left the auditorium to be driven back to his Wiltshire home.

But festival organiser Dominic Gregory said he couldn't have been happier with the writer's performance. "It was better than I could have hoped for," he said.

"It kicked off the festival to an absolutely brilliant start. There was a really

warm atmosphere and he did a brilliant reading.

"Personally I found he was really charming - a really interesting man and I immediately warmed to him because as soon as he arrived in Ilkley and got out of the car on Wells Road he looked up and down the dales and said 'this is beautiful'."

The vice chairman of Ilkley Parish Council, Heathcliffe Bowen, who attended the event, described VS Naipaul's reading as 'captivating'.

He added: "I was extremely happy to attend this prestigious opening and wish the literature festival well as it has a tremendous cross section of authors appearing this year."

The next day, deep thinker Alain de Botton, author of The Consolations of Philosophy, pondered the meaning of life at Ilkley Playhouse.

And on Sunday, Ilkley author Neil Hanson discussed his latest book,

The Dreadful Judgement, at Craiglands Hotel.

He was closely followed by one of Yorkshire's best known and most revered writers, Margaret Drabble, who talked to fans about The Peppered Moth, her most recent novel and one which is based on her troubled relationship with her own mother.