Can the Edinburgh International Book Festival repair itself?
After last year’s sponsorship furore nearly broke the Edinburgh International Book Festival, David Robinson looks ahead to see if new strands, new venues and appearances from internationally renowned writers can help it thrive
“In these censorious times, how best can we disagree without silencing?” That’s the question the Edinburgh International Book Festival's programme asks in the notes for its first event this morning and I can’t think of a better one.
It’s a question that haunts all book festivals. They’re fragile things, easily broken – as nearly happened last year with the senseless stushie set up by climate change activists over Baillie Gifford’s sponsorship. So when the organisers of this year’s festival, now left with hardly any corporate sponsorship, settled on the theme of “Repair”, you can’t help thinking that they had their own festival in mind too – as well as everything else in the world in danger of falling apart.
Though some of us will always feel nostalgia for the marquees of Charlotte Square, the festival’s new home at the Edinburgh Futures Institute more than meets its requirements. The McEwan Hall – venue for its biggest events – is just that bit nearer than Central Hall was to the festival’s three-year interim home at the Edinburgh College of Art, so the Front List events there feel more integrated into the overall programme, which itself is more closely folded into the George Square/Bristo Square Fringe buzz.
Edinburgh has a long-established reputation for attracting the world’s best writers, and this year is no exception. Flick through the festival programme (for my money, the most clearly designed yet), and they’re on almost every page: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, for example, talking about her first novel for a dozen years, Abdulrazak Gurnah on his first since winning the Nobel, last year’s Booker winner Samantha Harvey, or Ian McEwan giving a preview of his new novel, out next month. Such is the embarras de richesses that tonight you can even find such supremely gifted novelists as Alan Hollinghurst and Tash Aw sharing the same stage.
Yet there’s far more to festival director Jenny Niven’s programme than literary fiction. I’ve never yet been to one of the Table Talk events at Elliot’s Studio but have heard good things about them. I also like one of her other innovations from last year, the 10am First Edition strand in the Spiegeltent discussing the day’s news. This year though, the real game-changer is the Young Adult programme, now hugely beefed up and quite separate from the children’s programme. This makes more sense if you accept the festival’s definition of young adult as meaning anyone under 30 - and not, as I’d always thought, teenagers.
The events in the YA programme - divided as they are into nine genres - are far more than the usual tokenism, with bestselling writers such as Asako Yukuzi and RF Kuang from Japan and the US respectively alongside our own Alice Osman. On Monday, for example, YA writers take over the Spiegeltent for most of the day, along with free quizzes, games and “bookish (and platonic)” speed dating. Along with the lower prices for under-30s, the £5 tickets for those on benefits, it all amounts to the book festival’s most determined attempt yet to grow a new audience.
Will it work? Certainly it’s a break with previous years’ programming, which tended to assume that the audience for adult fiction would automatically increase with age. That’s certainly the way things used to happen, but does it still?
Yet the last thing the book festival can do is to take its grey-haired audience for granted. Its rivals have never been better. At Traquair, for example, the15th Beyond Borders festival (23-4 August) more than matches it for politics (Sturgeon, Yousaf, McConnell, Corbyn), news makers in general (Médecins Sans Frontières boss Chris Lockyear for example) and journalists of the calibre of Jim Naughtie and Lyse Doucet. Tickets from www.bbintfest.com.
Even closer to home and starting on Monday, the Royal Scots Club at 29-31 Abercrombie Place hosts an inaugural Festival of Writing Worth Reading (tickets are £12.50, from www.royalscotsclub.com/events). Cannily exploiting the fact that the EIBF’s morning programme isn’t as strong as it used to be, at 10.30 every day until August 23 (apart from the 17th), it features such writers as Liz Lochhead, James Robertson, Rosemary Goring and Bendor Grosvenor. All that and tea and coffee too – though as yet no mention of biscuits.
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