David J Black

Before considering the newcomer it must be said that to visit the main event was to witness a miracle which, a mere two years ago, would have been unimaginable. Battered by the Covid lockdown, the book festival re-emerged in a state of fragility only to be savaged by a strident self-righteous band of ‘book industry activists’ which sought, firstly, to draw attention to themselves as hectoring friends of our doomed planet, and, secondly, to cancel the ever generous sponsorship of major backer local investment managers Baillie Gifford for its alleged (and vanishingly minimal) support of the fossil fuel industry. The details of this literary tale of infamy have already been vented in this parish in How to burn down a book festival.

The origin story - way back in 1983 a few cultured souls indulged what some suspected might be a feckless dream when they set up a tent city in Charlotte Square Gardens and invited the public to come along to ‘meet the author’ events. Thus began the first golden age of Jenny the 1st – otherwise book festival founding director Jenny Brown. We will come to the renaissance of Jenny the 2nd – otherwise Jenny Niven – in due course.

By the late 90s this biennial event had become a yearly fixture for authors and audiences from across the world, raising Edinburgh’s international profile to such a remarkable degree that in 2004 UNESCO designated it the world’s first ‘City of Literature.’ The book festival went from strength to strength but with over 700 authors and quarter of a million visitors it was decided that it had outgrown its Charlotte Square setting – “the finest open air drawing-room in Europe” – and in 2019 it relocated to Edinburgh Art College – a year later Covid hit. Whatever could be salvaged took place online.

Phoenix-like, and with vital rallying support from Ian and Miranda Rankin and culture minister (and author of an excellent biography of Vienna) Angus Robertson, among others, the book festival has more than risen from the ashes. While the nostalgic consensus is that the dream-years of Charlotte Square will never be recaptured, the move along Lauriston Place is unquestionably a step in the right direction, and comes with the added bonus of the McEwen Hall as a bolt-on venue.

There will always be elements of dissent, which is as it should be, since not all is necessarily for the best, even in the best of all possible worlds. Yet it seems churlish of Darren ‘Loki’ McGarvey to decry his exclusion from the list. After all, his Orwell prize-winning Poverty Safari of 2018 was much platformed – he even delivered the BBC’s 2022 Reith Lecture, while his Trauma Industrial Complex, a Royal Society of Edinburgh 2024 ‘signature event’, was adapted as a five part series for BBC Radio 4. He’s surely the last author who should be complaining.

On the other hand for the Book Festival to exclude an anthology of gender critical writers, The Women Who Wouldn’t Weesht, is a sorry act of censorship. Taking its cue from the National Library of Scotland, which removed the anthology from an exhibition of books nominated by the public on the imagined grounds that it was promoting a sinister ‘terf’ agenda, the Book Festival organisers decided that the book was “too divisive”.

This provides such commentators on the right as The Telegraph’s Zoe Strimpel with the ammunition to blast Edinburgh’s Festivals as some sort of daft Woke-junket. Having always been as attentive to the late Roger Scruton as to George Monbiot, your scrivener has never been much concerned with left-right tribalism, believing that censorship by any faction should be vigorously resisted, and institutions should not be held to ransom by unaccountable lobbies of which we know little.

Some of us have skin in the game, of course. Over 20 years ago your scribe upset the moguls of the newly devolved Scottish establishment by writing an honest book about the spiralling costs of the Holyrood building and the political shenanigans behind it. This met with the wrath of those who would have preferred to keep the truth under wraps, and the gates of hell opened.

The city library later staged a display of books about the Scottish Parliament, and I was informed by some who visited it that my book had been excluded. On enquiring I was glibly informed that the intention had been to feature only publications which put a “positive spin” on the subject. Then, in 2011, the National Library of Scotland launched a major exhibition of banned books in which my own incendiary effort didn’t feature. I wasn’t too put out – after all my book now had a wonderful strap line, namely ‘The only banned book excluded from an exhibition of banned books’. Given such experience, it follows that this scribbler’s sympathies lie with The Women Who Wouldn’t Weesht.

That niggling negativity aside, the book festival organisers have turned disaster into triumph with a breathtaking chutzpah which does them great credit. It was no mean feat to pull together 700 events, some with two or three authors on the bill, after the drubbing they received from such posturing protesters as Charlotte Church, Nish Kumar, Sally Rooney, and Katherine Rundell – the latter a winner of the £50,000 Baillie Gifford award. Someone should write a book about it!

The 2025 offering was mixed, and not always comforting. Allan Little chaired an event with Jim Swire and his co-author Peter Biddulph. Their book Fighting for the Truth disputes the official version of the Lockerbie bombing. Dr Swire’s account of identifying the remains of his daughter Flora moved some to tears. Another tough call was journalist Jen Stout (Night Train to Odesa) and Olesya Khromeychuck of the Ukrainian Institute in London (The Death of a Soldier told by his Sister) on the death of poet, novelist, and war crimes investigator Victoria Amelina, who would undoubtedly have been appearing in Edinburgh had she not been killed in a Russian missile strike.

Ukraine was very much on the menu, with a return visit from Andrey Kurkov and an appearance by celebrated chef Olia Hercules, while it was also heartening to see the return of Philippe Sands, this time with a focus on London, South America, and General Pinochet’s links with the Nazi diaspora in 38 Londres Street.

The spread of offerings in the Futures Institute has, much as in past years, been wonderfully diverse, ranging from Booker Prizewinner Samantha Harvey, whose Orbital, we learn, is categorised in Canadian bookshops under ‘plotless novels’. Tasmanian author, Richard Flanagan, another Booker winner, has been rated the most important writer of the past 100 years by none other than Peter Carey. 

Politicians naturally featured. Not only Madame Marmite (Nicola Sturgeon) but also that voice from the past, Henry McLeish, who had co-authored a book on devolution with Professor James Mitchell, as well as Vince Cable, Diane Abbott, Chris Bryant, and newly elected Yuan Yang in a sparky discussion with The Observer’s Will Hutton.

Apropos the exclusion of The Women Who Wouldn’t Weesht, I gather some felt there might be an element of risk attached to an event by Israeli journalist Anshel Pfeffer, chaired by Jonathan Freedland, Behind the Curtain of Israeli Politics. Nobody caused a fuss, despite the fact that Israel’s war was, at that very moment, approaching fever pitch. In a commendably civilised discourse the audience listened attentively, and a number of intelligent questions were posed. In the past the book festival supported the virtue of free expression across the world featuring such events as the Amnesty International and Scottish PEN imprisoned writer’s series. It would be regrettable if it were to abandon such causes altogether, timidity being an unfortunate outcome of the culture wars.

Which brings us to Edinburgh’s other Book Festival – a mere 12 events featuring such hallowed literary names as James Robertson, Liz Lochhead, and Magnus Linklater on his novelist father, Eric. Other participants included American satirist Andrew Heaton, author of, among other gems, Laughter is Better Than Communism, with an interesting take on the Trump phenomenon, Bendor Grosvenor on The Invention of British Art, Professor Devi Sridhar on the Covid crisis, former Sun journalist Bill Coles on the Lucan mystery, and an interesting hour during which curator-chairman Alan Taylor interrogated his wife Rosemary Goring on her book on the captive years of Mary Queen of Scots, Exile. It seemed to work.