Authors let loose cover varied terrain

Book Festival

forums about the mid-life crisis, lamenting missed opportunities and changes in their appearance. No-one ever replied to their words, she said: they just faded away, ignored. Saywer advised us to seek to change small things about ourselves, and extolled the benefits of running very slowly. She herself listens to economic podcasts while running.

Tahar Ben Jelloun, Morocco’s greatest living author, spoke via an interpreter about his latest novel, About My Mother, which tells the story of her descent into dementia. He touched on the 19 months he spent in a Moroccan military prison, having been arrested as a student protestor. He wasn’t allowed to read or to write, but would do so in secret in the toilets. His writings were eventually published. Sharing the spotlight with fellow author, Nigerian-born Irenosen Okojie, he touched on terrorism, saying that jidahists had done something that no other organisation had managed to achieve: to change the survival instinct that all of us have into an instinct for death.

Yesterday began with an engrossing discussion between award-winning, New Zealandborn author Kirsty Gunn and chair, Dan Gunn – “no relation,” as Dan made clear at the outset, though Kirsty did say that both their fathers’ families came “from the same kind of bit of Caithness and there is something about Dan that feels very, very familiar to me”. The conversation turned to childhood reading. Perhaps, mused Dan, “children of the future will have a nostalgic pleasure about having an iPad in their hand as a child, because there will be some other machine that they’re linked up to by that point, or their brains will have been taken away from them, or something.”