Edinburgh Book Festival round-up: The People Speak | Richard Holloway | RF Kuang
As festival season comes to a close, a trio of ‘extraordinary events’ rounded out the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
Three extraordinary events concluded the Book Festival on Sunday night. The People Speak is an ongoing series of performances where actors and writers read aloud from poems, speeches, and writings on resistance and protest. Lord of the Rings star Viggo Mortensen led the line-up of readers for its Scottish debut, along with actor Stephen Rea and writers Ekow Eshun, Irenosen Okojie, Ahmed Masoud, and musician Miwa Nagato-Apthorp.
The event fell on the birthday of American historian Howard Zinn, author of The People’s History of the United States, which inspired the project. In over 20 years, it has grown to encompass voices from around the world. Mortensen reminded us that 24 August is also Ukraine’s Independence Day.
An eclectic range of readings populated the hour, many speaking to specific situations, but also deeply resonant in the present moment: Zinn himself, Irish republican and socialist James Connolly on empire, an extract from Harold Pinter’s 2005 Nobel Prize address, Ngugu Wa Thiong’o on language. An uncredited account of the Battle of Cable Street in 1936 described how a mass gathering in the Jewish East End of London blocked the path of a march by Oswald Mosley’s Black Shirts.
Some of the texts were right up-to-date: James Schamus, screenwriter and academic, on the current situation facing American universities, and ‘If I Must Die’, a poem by Gaza-based writer and activist Refaat Alareer who was killed in December 2023 by an Israeli airstrike, read by Masoud, who was a personal friend.
For years, the finale of the book festival was in the hands of Richard Holloway, former Bishop of Edinburgh, who would preach to a sell-out crowd on values such as doubt, tolerance and kindness. He returned on Sunday for a conversation about his new book, Last Words, accompanied by music from cellist Justyna Yablonska and from the National Youth Choir of Scotland (NYCS).
Now 91, Holloway claims this book, which was inspired by a return visit to the street where he grew up in Alexandria in the Vale of Leven, will be his last. It is written with what he self-deprecatingly calls “sentimental gratitude” to his parents, Arthur and Mary, and to Father James Alexander Nigel Mackay, from St Mungo’s Episcopal Church in Alexandria, who drew him into the church and into the priesthood.
He reflected with “affectionate distance” on a long life which has seen him transform from Christian firebrand to his current position as “a practising, but non-believing, Christian”. “In my old age, I have become quite mellow, I used to be a fierce wee bugger,” he said. In the same period, the church has declined in popularity and influence, which leaves him with mixed feelings: sadness at the loss, yet glad that religion “no longer swaggers”.
His scepticism about any kind of an afterlife was a theme picked up in the other closing event of Sunday with bestselling novelist RF Kuang in the McEwan Hall. Just 29, and already the author of five novels, Kuang talked with enormous intelligence and grace about her new campus novel, Katabasis, about two postgraduate students who travel to hell in search of their supervisor, prompted in part by her own unease about “eternity and infinity”.
“This is a weird time to be working on a novel which critiques higher education, as we are in the midst of an unprecedented attack on higher education in the US,” she said. But she added that the Trump regime’s attack on universities has “clarified for me what is worth fighting for”.
Make sure you keep up to date with Arts and Culture news from across Scotland by signing up to our free newsletter here.
Comments
Want to join the conversation? Please or to comment on this article.