This weekend, bookish Americans flocked to the National Book Festival in Washington, DC, and to the Brooklyn Book Festival. Never content to be outdone, the French launched their own book festival this past weekend as well, the better to sneer at those of us who hold author panels without a full complement of champagne and Camembert. (I kid, the French, because I love.)

Sarah Moroz writes for Publishers Weekly that the Festival des Ecrivains du Monde (World Writers Festival) kicked off on Friday in Paris, and is — fittingly enough — a celebration of global literature. After spending the weekend in Paris, the festival moved to Lyon for Monday and Tuesday of this week, finally wrapping up yesterday. It attracted some 6,000 people over the course of five days.

Paul LeClerc, the director of Columbia Global Centers in Europe since July 2012 and a longtime employee of the New York Public Library, started the new festival with the hopes that it will become an annual event. Partnering with Bruno Racine, president of the Bibliothèque Nationale, to put together something “important intellectually, and global in nature.” The main criterion that authors had to meet in order to be invited was that their work had to have been translated into French — no great stumbling block, as Moroz reports that “French publishers translate more foreign authors into French than almost anyone else.”

The festival’s official website shows that events were held at a wide range of venues, including the Louvre, the auditorium at the offices of Le Monde newspaper, and the national library. Among the highlights, per Moroz, were a “nuanced and fascinating discussion” at the Théâtre des Abbesses in the Montmartre area, on the topic of globalization and literature, and a discussion of  “the confluence of literary work and visual artistry” in the garden of the Delacroix museum, led by the museum director and author Catherine Millet.