Edinburgh International Book Festival round-up: Ali Smith | Lindsey Hilsum | Edward Wong + more

Two days after the meeting of Trump and Putin in Alaska, two eminent journalists were on stage at the Book Festival addressing the unpredictable nature of US foreign policy in Trump 2.0. Lindsey Hilsum, international editor of Channel 4 News, and New York Times diplomatic correspondent Edward Wong, had plenty of insights to offer, if not a great deal of hope.

Hilsum, who was replacing Anne Applebaum who cancelled her appearance due to illness, said that Trump, who arrived in Alaska promising a ceasefire in Ukraine, “bought Putin’s line that we can’t have a ceasefire, we need a peace deal.”

Trump will continue to try to broker peace, however, Wong said, because “he is striving for a Nobel Peace Prize. It has been talked about, and he believes he can get one.”

Ali Smith | AFP via Getty Images

They agreed that Trump admires autocrats, and sees himself as being on the same stage as leaders like Putin and China’s Xi Jinping. Wong commented that among these men there is “a resurgence of thinking about imperial powers” which Trump also subscribes too, hence the abortive attempt to turn Canada into a vassal state of the USA.

Hilsum said that the Trump rollercoaster “sucks the energy out of the room” of international news causing her to worry about the stories that aren’t covered: “the dangers I see out of the corner of my eye”, like the war in Sudan and the rise of radicalised Islam in the Sahel in West Africa. But she drew hope from the engaged audience at the Book Festival, the near-full McEwan hall, and the “intellectual and creative ferment around Edinburgh”.

There could be no better phrase with which to describe the next event with novelist Ali Smith, a writer who always has her finger on the pulse of the times. It’s no coincidence that her latest book, Gliff, published just before the US election, is a dystopian novel which is already looking eerily prescient. She delighted the Book Festival audience by reading for the first time from the opening pages of the sequel.

Smith echoed Hilsum and Wong by describing the prevailing drive among the powers of the world at the moment for “land-grab colonialism”.

“Colonialism is all about saying there is a ‘them’ and an ‘us’. There is no ‘them’ and ‘us’, there is only ‘us’. The great discovery of the twentieth century is DNA, we all have it.”

As a writer whose work is characterised by her endless inventiveness with words, she hit out at AI writing tools.

“Language is being flattened [by AI]. It becomes meaningless. What would we give that power to a machine? AI will write books but it is never ever going to have a soul.”

The secret of hope, she says, lies in the human soul, which has the capacity to identify what is true and tell the true story of our times.

Sometimes the Book Festival brings together a pair of writers whose work is a match made in heaven, as it did on Monday morning with Kerri Andrews and Roger Clough, authors who have both written books about walking, though approaching it from very different perspectives.

Andrews, author of Wanderers: A History of Women Walking, writes about her own experience of becoming a mother in her new book, Pathfinding. In it, she describes how she regained her confidence and sense of self after the births of her children through walking, and expresses her anger at the lack of core services to support new mothers.

Roger Clough, whose academic life specialised in the social care of the elderly, now finds himself in his eighties. Still a regular walker, in Olderland he writes to come to terms with the limitations of the ageing body and asks: “Can I live as I want to live? How can we find ways to carve out our own old age?”

Susan Mansfield

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