Book Festivals

Brilliant Boswell. 

There's a book festival happening in a couple of weeks and I just know that friends will ask me if I'm going. Probably not. There is only one event that genuinely interests me, and it's predictably over subscribed. I used to be invited to speak at the occasional festival (although never quite as many as I had books published) but the invitations have diminished over the years as the cloak of invisibility known as age spreads over me. 

To be fair, I have some talks organised in November - very much looking forward to them - and I was asked to participate in a local festival, but only as a 'chairperson' which means that you have to read the books and think of intelligent and illuminating questions. Although I'm always happy to talk about my own books, like many writers (although we don't often admit it) we don't always enjoy talking about other people's books, unless we're huge fans or possibly friends of the writer in question or both. I can probably count on the fingers of one hand the writers who I would be delighted to interview about their books, and a couple of them are dead. 

My most memorable festival was the Boswell Book Festival a few years ago, and it wasn't down to me at all. I had written a book called The Last Lancer about the Polish side of my family. The village where my father was born and spent a happy childhood is now in Ukraine. I was privileged to share a platform with a young Ukrainian woman and her daughter who had escaped from the Russian invasion but only just and at extreme peril. Her story illuminated some of what I had written about my own family in the most moving way possible, and continues to stay in my mind, as the war goes on. 

I've done hugely enjoyable events at Wigtown and Islay and once or twice at the Tidelines Festival in Irvine, but I'm on nobody's radar now, and that saddens me a bit. 

My funniest story about attending a book festival had better remain anonymous as to writer and chair - and even festival. It was a long time ago. The programme made the event in question seem quite tantalising. So we went. We found ourselves sitting in the very middle of a crowded room, with one door only and no means of escape, a situation which quickly became problematic. The book, which had better remain anonymous too, was a catalogue of detailed, perverted and bloody horrors, read aloud by the author with disturbing relish, and praised to the skies by the chairman. (I'm not a fan of trigger warnings in general, but if ever an event needed one this was it.) 

When we fell out of the venue an hour later, and went in search of strong coffee or alcohol for our shattered nerves, we wondered whether the fault lay with ourselves for not perceiving the genius of the writer in question. And then, dear reader, I passed the chairperson himself, walking away at speed and chatting animatedly to a friend. 

'God almighty, you should have heard him!' he said. 'An absolute nutter!'

We knew exactly who and what he was referring to and, silently, we agreed.