A-list line-up of literati will ensure a blockbuster book festival
Friday 22 June 2012 EIGHT Booker Prize winners and three nobel laureates – though one remains imprisoned in China – lead a powerful line-up in the Edinburgh International Book Festival this year that has won praise for director nick Barley.
Enticing offerings range from the unveiling of a new novel by the Atonement author Ian McEwan, to the launch of a children’s book by Little Britain star David Walliams.
The festival, which runs from 11-27 August, kicks off a new global gathering of authors in the city, designed to commemorate a milestone writers’ conference advance. The poet Alice Oswald will put on a rare performance of Memorial, her 75-minute reimagining of The Iliad.
Observers said yesterday that Mr Barley has found his stride in his third summer as director. “It is a good, strong programme,” said Marc Lambert, CEO of the Scottish Book Trust.
Iain Gale, critic and editor of the Scottish magazine The Arts Journal, said: “I think it’s much stronger than last year, I’m quite excited by it. There are some names in there that I really want to get to grips with.”
The festival boasts more than 800 authors from 44 countries. Booker winners with new books include McEwan, Scottish author James Kelman and Regeneration author Pat Barker. Another winner Howard Jacobson, and the writer Zadie Smith, will offer sneak previews of forthcoming works – Smith’s first in seven years.
In a stand-out line-up in the children’s section this year, Walliams launches his new children’s book Gangsta Granny, while a special session on sequels will see the distinguished poet Andrew Motion discuss Silver, his follow-up to Treasure Island, with Frank Cottrell Boyce, author of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again. In October 2009, nick Barley’s appointment as Edinburgh International Book Festival director raised a few eyebrows among the Scottish literati, many of whom had never heard of him.
Three years on, the doubters have been all but silenced. The book festival programme Barley unveiled yesterday is not only one of the biggest ever to take place at Charlotte Square but establishes Edinburgh’s place on the world’s cultural map more firmly than ever before.
The £565,000 project means that discussions on key literary themes that begin in Charlotte Square will then be mirrored at similar events in 14 book festivals throughout the world.
This is easily the biggest initiative the book festival has ever launched – indeed as the Edinburgh World Writers’ conference rolls round the world it almost certainly ranks as the world’s biggest-ever literary discussion.
But the genius of the initiative is that it is rooted in Edinburgh’s own history, taking its discussion themes straight from the 1962 Writers Conference.
Fifty years go, those delegates who attended that conference almost certainly didn’t realise that they were laying the seeds for the world’s biggest book festival. If the cultural legacy of the World Writers’ Conference this August, is anything like as significant, it will be a major boost not just for the city, but for its book festival – and its director – too.