Tuesday 17 August 2010

The opening weekend of the Edinburgh International Book Festival was big. Located in the elegant Charlotte Square Gardens, the bookfest pops up as an elegant tent city, and on Saturday the festival came to life.

During the weekend there was a full program of debates, discussions and readings – enough to make your head spin with choice! There are two streams of festival events every day, the adult’s and the children’s program. Interestingly, both programs and the festival as a whole were launched by Australians: Christos Tsiolkas talking about The Slap, which is getting a huge reception in the UK, and Garth Nix talking all things The Keys to the Kingdom. Both events were sold out.

Charlotte Square Gardens in summer swing

The sun was shining all weekend, and all day on Saturday and Sunday Charlotte Square was packed with people sitting in the sun enjoying a glass of wine, reading books and talking about the panels and discussions they have been enjoying. It is a heartening sight and the festival organisers were gleeful that it didn’t rain on the first day – for the first time since 2004! Another landmark is that this year is the 21st Edinburgh International Book Festival, a statistic that made me excited about the potential future possibilities for the Emerging Writers’ Festival.

Saturday night saw the Spiegeltent crowded and the whiskey flowing for the opening night party, which after formal speeches was a good shin-dig and a chance to meet writers and festival staff.

At the long-running Book Festival Fringe, hosted by Word Power Books, there was a fantastic event with Australia’s Craig Silvey and Christos Tsiolkas. They were in discussion about Silvey’s novel Jasper Jones, and it was a thought-provoking and wide-ranging conversation that kept the crowded shop enthralled for a good hour.

As well as the novel, one of the topics covered was are modern writers making a new Australian voice? Craig replied that he thinks there is less pressure to use ‘British language’ and Christos spoke passionately about how he wants Australian writers to think about what our language is and where it comes from. It was a fantastic event with two talented and intelligent Aussie writers. (And of course, given that it was sunny, we all adjourned to the pub afterwards.) I look forward to seeing many more Fringe events, which are all free and unticketed.

A night of McSex at the Unbound event

The weekend ended with the first of the Unbound events – a free festival-within-a-festival where writers are encouraged to try new ways of talking about their work. On Sunday evening the event was hosted by Glasgow-based indie lit journal Gutter, and was called A Night in the Gutter: McSex. It looked at the Scottish tradition of erotic writing and featured a handful of established and emerging writers reading sex scenes from Scottish writers across the ages, from Robert Burns to Irvine Welsh. It was a corker and the packed Spiegeltent went off with laughs and a few uncomfortable moments too.

The full Unbound program is eclectic and exciting, and if last night’s McSex success was any indication, the events will be ones not to miss!

There is still another full two weeks of bookfest to go; it’s an incredibly large and exciting program. The Edinburgh International Book Festival are maintaining a great social media presence so check out @EdBookFest and #edbookfest to keep up with all the action live from the festival.

Lisa Dempster is the Director of the Emerging Writers' Festival. She’s in Edinburgh to attend the British Council’s Book Case Conference and the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

They say you should never meet your heroes.

I did.

I met Bret Easton Ellis when he was in town last week. A friend remarked to me that it must be something to meet your idol as a peer. “What do you mean?” I asked, genuinely baffled. “You know, as a fellow writer,” he replied. Suddenly I was filled with anxiety about the meeting. Was I meant to play it cool? Was I expected to approach my favorite author with an air of benign indifference? I was paralysed with the idea that when meeting him I would behave in a way that was unfitting. Would he sense my fandom and find it off-putting?

If he did, he didn’t show it. But I shouldn’t have been surprised. Ellis also wears his fandom on his sleeve. His conversation is peppered with references to his favorite bands, movies and TV shows (don’t even get him started on The Hills!). At the sold-out Athenaeum event Ellis said that the pinnacle of his career was when he received a phone call from Joan Didion, whose seminal LA novel Play It As It Lays was the inspiration for Less Than Zero. Didion was phoning to say she was dedicating her new collection of essays to Ellis, at which point the author says he saw “white light” and dramatically sank to the floor. I’m pretty sure the enthused crowd at the Athenaeum were experiencing their own “white light” moment just being in BEE’s presence. Ellis is the rarest of celebrities: a pop culture icon who attained this status without dying young and tragic. Love him or hate him, Ellis gets people talking, and in a world where the novel is supposedly dying, polarising and controversial authors are needed now more than ever. If the literary world had more rock stars like Ellis, one can’t help but think the industry would be in a much healthier state than it is now. Fervent adoration sure breeds sales.

So I wear my fandom proudly, if we are going to call it that. It seems a very reductive term for my appreciation of the worlds Ellis and my other favorite authors have given me, worlds that inspired me to write myself in the hope I could come close to creating these experiences for other people. Now all that’s left is to meet my other two literary heroes, a couple of guys I affectionately refer to as the two Steve’s: Steve Martin and Stephen King. Can anyone hook me up?

Kathy Charles is the author of Hollywood Ending from Text Publishing, which will be released in North America as John Belushi is Dead by MTV Books.