Striving to keep book festival ahead of the game
CHARLOTTE Square Gardens are quiet at the moment, but not for long. This pleasant, leafy venue at the far end of George Street in Edinburgh will, over the second half of August, entertain around a quarter of a million book-lovers, all drawn to the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
The festival began in 1983 as a biennial event and became an annual fixture in 1997. It has grown at a remarkable rate since then. In the words of its Twitter bio, it is the world’s largest public celebration of the written word.
The 2015 programme includes such notable authors and figures as Marilynne Robinson, Anne Enright, Rev Jesse Jackson, Antony Beevor, John Burnside, AL Kennedy, Howard Jacobson, Blake Morrison and Colm Toibin. Of the 13 names on the recentlyannounced Man Booker longlist, nine – Robinson and Enright among them – will be here between August 15 and 31. There will, all told, be some 800 authors from the UK and overseas, covering every literary discipline.
It is stating the obvious to say that a tremendous amount of work goes into making each book festival a success. Nick Barley, the Yorkshireman who was appointed director in 2009 – his first festival in 2010 featured four Nobel laureates and four Booker winners – says he first started giving thought to the 2015 festival more than a year ago.
“Planning for this year started even before last year’s was finished,” he says. “A number of conversations take place over many, many years, but the bulk of the planning for each festival happens immediately after the previous festival finishes. I’m already thinking of next year’s festival. I obviously can’t talk about what each year’s themes are going to be until we officially announce the programme, but I start interrogating possibilities. My job is to try to imagine what the world will be thinking about in a year’s time. I start thinking about what the trends and the big questions and doubts and worries will be.
“Round about this time a year ago I had to try to project forwards to think what the world would be like, with the [independence] referendum not yet having happened, and with the British General Election taking place just eight months after the referendum. It was a really tricky year in which to try to think ahead. But I was really sure that Scotland, and all this discussion about Scotland’s future, needed to take place in the context of an international background, that Scotland is an international nation. I had it in my mind, though, that we might be sick of all this conversation between Holyrood and Westminster and might be eager for something bigger: I wanted to zoom out from that particular axis.”
Barley’s line of thought finds its voice in his introduction to this year’s programme. Our era is characterised by great waves of human migration, he says, and whereas the Scottish diaspora has spread stories and ballads across the world, this year’s festival will welcome people from other cultures. By the end of this month, Charlotte Square Gardens will have played host to authors from 55 countries, from Mexico to Iceland.
Barley studied at Kent University and went on to publish and edit arts books and magazines during the 1990s, among them the noted art magazine Tate. In 2003 he became editor of The List, in Edinburgh. Three years later, he took over at The Lighthouse, in Glasgow. In 2009, the book festival beckoned.
The festival is fond of describing itself as the largest and most dynamic event of its kind in the world but, even so, it does not exactly have the field to itself. Its rivals, if they can be termed such, are many. “There has been an explosion of literary festivals across the world in the last 20 years,” acknowledges Barley. “Edinburgh was one of the first and is probably still, I believe, one of the best. Nevertheless, we have to work very hard to stay in that position. We continually need to have to have conversations with writers. I have to know what’s coming years in advance and to try to position Edinburgh as part of what an author is thinking about. If we don’t do that, we will miss out.”
An excellent case in point is Rev Jesse Jackson, one of the world’s best-known civil right activists, who will be at the Baillie Gifford Main Theatre on August 22. “We’re really pleased he has decided to come,” Barley says. “Again, this involved long conversations ... people of that calibre have timetables
‘‘ Planning for this year started even before last year’s was finished. I’m already thinking of next year’s festival
that are booked up far in advance.”
A measure of the extent to which the bookfest team sometimes go cropped up last August when the bestselling Japanese author Haruki Murakami attended. The buzz surrounding his appearance was considerable: he is, after all, is a much-feted author and, moreover, one who does not often do festivals. Barley had been in touch with Murakami for five long years before he agreed to take part. In order for the author to attend Edinburgh, however, Barley had to persuade all the worldwide publishers of his latest novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, to co-ordinate the publication date so that Edinburgh would be the launch event. That this was actually achieved said much for Edinburgh’s reputation.
Barley reveals that a dozen of this year’s events, including Nicola Sturgeon’s conversation with Val McDermid on August 26, will be livestreamed on the BBC – www.bbc.co.uk/ edinburghfestivals – with some of them later screened on BBC network TV.
Eight hundred authors, 500 accredited international journalists, BBC personnel, an estimated 220,000 visitors. Rev Jesse Jackson, too. Charlotte Square Gardens will, for 17 unbroken days this month, be a very busy place indeed.