Islay hosts festival of wild books, crime, and robot dancing
Crimewriting is hugely popular on Islay, ” Isla Rosser Owen
THE ISLAY Book Festival expands across the island and over the Sound to Jura this week, including a ‘crime evening’ in the Round Church.
Islay’s annual ‘lively and enjoyable festival’, which runs from September 28 to October 1, grew out of a small book club in Port Ellen, but now its volunteers are offering a bigger programme of events for adults and children of all ages.
Colin MacIntyre hosts a words and music performance on September 29, after visiting Islay High School’s higher and advanced higher English classes to discuss his contribution to publisher W&N’s ‘Hometown Tales’ series, in which he writes about growing up on Mull.
As a bonus, Colin is also bringing his uncle Eric MacIntyre to speak to the school’s history students about his research
into World War I.
There are also local history walks based on ‘Islay Voices’, an anthology of oral history, writings, records, poems and songs about Islay, and book-binding craft workshops and drop-in sessions. Bowmore’s Round Church hosts a historical crime evening on Saturday September 30, involving a conversation between two of Scotland’s leading crime writers, Sara Sheridan and ES Thomson.
Chairwoman Isla Rosser Owen said: ‘Both have recently contributed to the Bloody Scotland crime-writing anthology set in Scotland’s historic buildings, so the Round Church would seem to be a very appropriate venue for this event.
‘Crime writing is hugely popular on Islay, with about half the mobile library shelves taken up with the likes of Peter May and Ann Cleeves in particular, so we look forward to offering some crime to the local community while also introducing writers they may be less familiar with.
‘Our writing workshop sold out fairly early on, which was a big surprise to us as it’s the first time we’ve offered a writing workshop on the island and so it was a bit of an experiment, and it was a real pleasure to see the level of interest in this. I think 90 per cent of the attendees are from Islay and Jura.
‘This year, we’ve also got a puppetry workshop for children, as well as a Gaelic storytelling and song session, and, of course, we have Alan Windram coming along to do some sessions in the primary schools and promote his new book ‘One Button Benny’, which intriguingly features ‘robot dancing’ and ‘robot karaoke’.
‘We had a ‘wild books’ scheme where we placed our authors’ books around the island for people to find, read, and then leave for someone else to find. We’ve been tracking these on the Bookcrossing.com website, and we’ve discovered that they’ve already travelled to all sorts of places. Some of Ryan’s poetry ended up at Blair Atholl horse trials and Helen Sedgwick’s ‘The Comet Seekers’ reached as far as North Carolina around the same time as Hurricane Irma.
‘We’ve also been running a photography competition linked to Konrad Borkowski’s ‘Whisky Island’ photography session, which is on September 30. We asked people to send in pictures of what the ‘Spirit of Islay’ meant to them and we received an amazing 112
entries from near and far. In fact, two of our shortlisted finalists are from France.
‘And our other, still ongoing, initiative is that we’ve challenged visiting poet Pauline Prior-Pitt to compose a poem for Islay in real-time over the festival weekend based on word contributions from the public. So we’ve been asking people to send in words to us via social media or email, or to put them on post-its and stick them up on our board during the festival. So far we’ve had some great words submitted, e.g. skein, gloaming, and mizzle.
‘We’re visiting Jura on September 28, which also happens to be National Poetry Day so we’re sending poet Ryan Van Winkle over to do a poetry workshop at the primary school and a poetry event for the community. Our bookbinder, Corinna Krause, will also be joining him to talk about her work. It’s nice to be able to offer something to our very close neighbour and we hope to continue to do so in future. Our main aim this year has been to offer our audiences a lively and enjoyable festival that has a varied programme for adults and children, in order to set the festival on a new path for the future, and we really hope we’ve achieved that.’