Edinburgh International Book Festival
Charlotte Square, 14-30th August 2004
Vivien Devlin curls up in a comfy armchair to tell us all about the novelists and poets, crime writers and children's storytellers who will be making their way to Edinburgh for the Book Festival in August, 2004.
Happy 21st Birthday
"A book is like a garden in the pocket" - this delightful slogan captures the creative spirit of the Edinburgh Book Festival, which has taken place since 1983 in the tranquil surroundings of Charlotte Square Gardens. This year the programme cover illustration epitomises the energy and enthusiasm of the thousands of writers and readers, their love of words, books and ideas, which make this fabulous summer festival happen. This year it is in the mood to celebrate."We are throwing the planet's biggest and best literary party this August. This is a party where the conversation is every bit as good as the company - we hope everyone will join in."
Catherine Lockerbie, Director, EIBF
2004 is certainly a timely year to celebrate great Scottish writers and writing. Edinburgh is currently being considered for designation as the world's first UNESCO City of the Literature. From Sir Walter Scott, Robert Burns and Robert Louis Stevenson to Muriel Spark, Ian Rankin and J. K Rowling, Edinburgh has for generations been an intellectual melting pot and creative inspiration for writers. With such a proud literary heritage and legacy there is not a shadow of a doubt that Edinburgh is an exceptionally worthy winner of the title, City of Literature.
Robert Louis Stevenson described Edinburgh as a "profusion of eccentricities, this dream in masonry and living rock, not a scene in a theatre, but a city in the world of every day reality" ... "There are no stars so lovely as Edinburgh street lamps. When I forget thee Auld Reekie, may my right hand forget its cunning"
Participating Authors
The Edinburgh International Book Festival (EIBF) is now the largest of its kind in the world. This year there will be over 650 events representing 30 countries including no less than 160 writers from Scotland. Two unique literary occasions will be the presence of Nobel Prize winning author Toni Morrison as well as internationally acclaimed novelist Dame Muriel Spark who returns to the city of her birth from her adopted home in Italy.
In novels such as The Bluest Eye, Tar Baby and Beloved, Toni Morrison describes with personal insight a dark world of repression, racial tension and the fight for human rights. It was through writing down what she felt and saw that she found a sense of freedom - "I reclaimed myself and the world, I named it, I described it, I identified it, I recreated it" she once commented.
Now in her mid 80s and despite a lifetime writing short stories and novels, Muriel Spark will be forever linked with The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the brilliant characterisation - both comic and heartrending - of an Edinburgh school teacher, artistic, passionate and in her prime of life, inspired by Spark's own experiences at James Gillespie School for Girls. "If only you small girls would listen to me, I would make of you the crème de la crème."
Spark's latest novel - her 22nd - The Finishing School returns to the school environment, this time the College Sunrise in Switzerland. The story opens with a discussion on how to write fiction, about describing the real, the imaginary and the mundane. Ali Smith reviewed the novel for The Guardian.
"It is one of her funniest novels. Its lightness is close to cartoon; its fluency is astonishingly athletic. Lithe and blithe and philosophical - this is Spark at her sharpest, her purest and her most merciful".
A perennial Book Festival favourite is the UK's number one best-selling crime writer, Ian Rankin whose grisly murderous novels are translated into 22 languages, which have won prestigious awards. He is back this year to discuss his 15th Inspector Rebus novel, Fleshmarket Close due out in September. When an asylum seeker is found murdered in an Edinburgh housing scheme, the investigation leads Rebus into the city's underworld and to an asylum seekers' detention centre. At the same time, two skeletons are found underneath a concrete floor in Fleshmarket Close, a dark alley leading down from the Royal Mile. Are the three deaths somehow connected? Read the book to find out what happens next.
The list of fine novelists goes on - Alexander McCall Smith, Doris Lessing, Jeannette Winterson, Val McDermid, Christopher Brookmyre, Kathy Lette, James Kelman, Julian Barnes, Candia McWilliam, Ronald Frame and Iain Banks. Writers will travel far and wide to visit Edinburgh this summer - Anita Desai from India, Amos Oz from Israel, Wilson Harris from the Caribbean, Patricia Melo from Brazil and Linn Ullmann (daughter of Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman) from Norway.
To mark the 21st birthday, there will be a focus on twenty-something writers - who were just born as the Book Festival began in 1983 - including Sophie Cooke and Colette Paul, who are already hitting the book review pages.
The surprise bestseller of the past year, Eats, Shoots and Leaves has been in the hardback top ten charts for 31 weeks. Author Lynne Truss will be at the Festival to discuss her outstanding success for a guide to correct spelling and grammar.
Playwright Simon Gray decided to write his autobiography, Smoking Diaries when he heard that his close friend Harold Pinter was suffering from cancer and soon after another friend, the poet and critic Ian Hamilton, died in 2001 aged just 63. It was an intimation of his own mortality. He decided to reveal the truth behind his addiction to smoking and alcohol and how he has survived to tell the tale.
Elsewhere in the garden Jenny Diski will be reliving her journeys across the United States sitting in the smoking car where she had some extraordinary encounters, now captured in her book Strangers on a Train.
"We were on a train, out of the way of our lives, any of us could tell anything we liked. We were, for the time being, just the story we told."
Jan Morris will be looking back over 50 years of travel essays now published in A Writer's World 1950-2000 while the remarkably outspoken lady Germaine Greer who will be talking about her latest social topic, "The Boy" about the classic beauty of youth. Family history is the topic of at least three writers - Alexander Waugh, grandson of Evelyn, as well as Michael Holroyd, who has 'painted' Mosaic, a self-portrait while Josceline Dimbleby investigates the life of her great grandmother, May Gaskell in A Profound Secret. After unearthing a host of unseen letters Josceline discovered that May had had a passionate relationship with the pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, which led Josceline on an incredible journey of discovery.
"On a cloud-stacked spring afternoon
you can hear how even the mildest wind
buffets your voice into a mourn-
ful staccato, how words are thinned
down to the roots.. "
Tom Pow from Clestrain:OrkneyTom Pow was shortlisted for the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year 2004 for his anthology, Landscapes and Legacies. He will join a vibrant collection of other award winning poets - Liz Lochhead, Douglas Dunn, Jackie Kay, Don Paterson and Carol Ann Duffy who are just a few of the 160 Scottish writers taking part.
"So slow as torture, he discloses bit by bit,
my mother's name, my original name
the hospital I was born in, the time I cameOutside, Edinburgh is soaked in sunshine,
I talk to myself walking past the castle
So, so, so, I was a midnight baby after all"
Jackie Kay, The Adoption PapersEvents
The 2004 programme is filled with Meet the Author sessions, lectures, readings, discussions, debate, writing and publishing sessions for budding writers as well as evening musical entertainment in the Glenmorangie Spiegeltent.
Two bestseller cutting-edge writers made their name overnight with their debut novels - Irvine Welsh, (Trainspotting) and Alex Garland (The Beach) both of which were made into cult films. Welsh will discuss his life and novel writing since Trainspotting, while Garland talks about his new novel, The Coma, a psychological mystery..
On the opening day of the Festival Louis de Bernieres will surely draw the crowds when he talks about the long awaited sequel to Captain Corelli's Mandolin. Entitled Birds without Wings, it features the same heady mix of love and savagery, war and Mediterranean idyll. "I'm one of those writers who's always going to be trying to write War and Peace: failing, obviously, but trying" he says. The novel can certainly be seen as a kind of modern take on Tolstoy - and it's a hybrid - part novel, part historical account - based on factual events, the exile of Christians from Turkey. De Bernieres is dedicated to impart the truth through fiction - "A book is a message to the world, and it would be nice to think that people might still hear the message after my death." As one review summarised, "Baggy and overlong in places, this is nevertheless one of the most profound and moving books you're likely to read."
Whatever your interest in books and reading, there will be an event for you with writers of fiction, biography, crime, poetry, philosophy, travel, science, history, politics, film, food and drink, media, theatre and religion. Special themes will run through the festival on topical issues surrounding war reporting, exile, East and West - with debates on Islam and the war in Iraq.
Good conversation and debate has always been the aim of the Book Festival bringing people from all walks of life and background to discuss current affairs and social issues. The Role of the War Reporter will involve a platform of the leading journalists of our day - Kate Adie, Allan Little and Martin Bell - who will consider the challenges of their daily job. There will be major appearances from Robin Cook, former Foreign Secretary, Stella Rimington, former DG of MI5 and Tony Benn whose memoirs, The Weetabix Years looks at his childhood and early political life.
A series of debates is planned on current women's issues including a discussion on childbirth and motherhood with Sheila Kitzinger, a leading authority on the subject.
"To be a mother is to take on one of the most emotionally and intellectually demanding, exasperating, strenuous, anxiety-arousing and deeply satisfying tasks that any human being can undertake. There is a great sisterhood out there - the diversity, ingenuity, energy and courage of mothers."
Ourselves as MothersChildren's Book Festival
Which leads neatly on to the terrific Children's Book Festival programme offering 250 events for babies to teenagers, with art and writing workshops. Writers include Anne Fine, Debi Gliori, Michael Morpurgo, Aileen Paterson and Jacqueline Wilson.
In Its Prime
In 1983 the EIBF hosted 30 Meet the Author sessions. This year there are over 500 novelists, poets, biographers, crime writers, politicians, historians, cookery writers, scientists and journalists visiting Charlotte Square Gardens. The Festival will end with a birthday party - a Grand Ceilidh of music and dance, conversation and a dram in the Glenmorangie Spiegeltent.Like Miss Jean Brodie, The Edinburgh International Book Festival, now celebrating its 21st birthday, is certainly in its prime.
Where else would you like to go in Scotland?
