Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Number 2 | Page 126

Nick Barley, Director, Edinburgh International Book Festival
I feel at my most useful to society when I’m angry. That is not to say I manifest
that anger in my behaviour. But it does inform my programming. And to put
it more generally, periods when the writers and the writing community are
not angry coincide with periods when literature is not all that interesting, as
a general rule.
When people are angry about the Second World War or angry about poverty,
they write good literature. And the period of what gets dismissively referred
to as Kitchen Sink modernism—British middle class writers where all they
had to write about was middle-aged relationships breaking up—tended to
produce literature that is not all that memorable. Anger is a generator and
motor that drives good artistic practice.
Similarly, for programmers, I think we have to be angry and to have passion.
Unless we have passion for programming we should stop. I only want to do a
book festival in order to try to answer questions I’ve got about why Scotland,
the UK, Europe, the world is the way it is right now, about why globalisation
has done what it’s done to us. That’s the key to all my programming. It
doesn’t mean I have to stand on the rooftop and proclaim all my political
beliefs. I’m creating a forum in which other people can do that, and acting
as a conduit. The book festival works because it’s not authors speaking down
to audiences. It’s participants speaking to one another. Everyone has an
opportunity to exchange their views. In this I think book festivals have acted
as participatory trailblazers.
Audiences trust our Festival to introduce them to new perspectives that they
often haven’t thought about, to people from other cultures, other languages
who see the world differently.
Artists can also express anger and anxiety in very different ways. It doesn’t
have to be out of control. It can be very measured. I can think of poets who
would never say that they are angry or anxious, but they can have an assured,
incisive way of seeing things or expressing things that carries questions in
it about why things are the way they are. They allow people to shift their
perspectives.
When I think about the programme, my initial anxiety is about not being
quite local or international enough. More deeply local has to go along with
being more deeply international. That’s why we’ve been working on projects
that are about trying to find out what local means.
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