revolution in the air
If you want to hear tomorrow’s news today, you need to be at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. With 800 authors in 750 events over two and a half weeks, it is a hotbed of prescient ideas. It means that when director Nick Barley decided tobuild his 2011 programme around the theme of revolution – such a hot topic this year – he realised the writers had got there already. “Literary festivals help us understand what’s going on in the world,” he says. “Nobody could deny 2011 has been an extraordinary year of tumultuous change. So revolution is the theme of our festival, not just in terms of North African and Arab protest movements but revolutionary changes in ideas, such as the way the internet is changing how we govern ourselves.” You might think the publishing industry would take a while to catch up with such major cultural movements, but Barley says the reverse is true. “There are Egyptian, Libyan, American, Chinese, Indian writers who have all been foreseeing this revolution,” he says. “Literature and nonfiction have a lot to say about the events that are happening as if they came out of nowhere but actually came out of things that have been bubbling away for years.”
Edinburgh International Book Festival 13–29 August www.edbookfest.co.uk >>