The Edinburgh book festival is to champion the positive power of hope later this summer with events involvingHanif Kureishi, the Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish and an exiled Brazilian tribal leader.
The core theme for this year’s festival will be the “expansive” concept of repair, and offering solutions and optimism at a time of crisis and conflict, said Jenny Niven, the event’s director.
“I think it’s an act of hope,” Niven said. “Repair is a positive, optimistic approach, [and] looking at journalism, looking at politics, there are a lot of things that are broken – politically, mental health and wellbeing, societally.
“And rather than leaving people sort of worried, we’re hoping that we can present new writers and thinkers who offer solutions and new ideas and great analysis that moves the conversation forward.”
That strand will begin with an opening gala featuring new commissions fromDarwish, Juma Xipaia, a Brazilian Indiginous leader forced into exile after she challenged government corruption, and others such as Jenni Fagan and Amitav Ghosh. Kureishi, who had a catastrophic fall thatleft him paralysed, will appear online with a “very personal perspective on repair”.
Niven said she was also striving to broaden the festival’s appeal, both to increase its audience but also to much more accurately reflect what people read.
That includes putting on the formerScotlandfootballer turned pundit Ally McCoist with his new autobiography Dear Scotland, and the Gavin and Stacey writer and co-star Ruth Jones, who will take part in the festival’s “Front List” strand of celebrity writers at the 1,000-seat capacity McEwan Hall.
Nicola Sturgeon, the former first minister, will discuss her new memoir Frankly with Kirsty Wark, originally billed as the book’s launch event, though Sturgeon has since added in several talks earlier in the week, beginning with an event in Manchester.
Among the 700 events in this year’s edition of the festival, which before the Covid crisis laid claim to be the world’s largest literature festival, will be a greatly expanded series of cookery shows, after the few it staged last year “went gangbusters”, Niven said.
There will be seven cookery demonstrations at a cookery school featuring chefs such as Sabrina Ghayour offering Persian cuisine, lunch with Rosie Kellett and Spanish cookery with José Pizarro, where the audience will eat the meals they make.
Tickets will be sought after: there will be 44 tickets for each, with several three-hour-long cookery events costing up to £100 a head – among the most expensive tickets of all the festivals this year.
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With the book festival now in a new and unfamiliar home on the south side ofEdinburgh, in an extensively remodelled Victorian hospital now part of Edinburgh University, Niven is attempting to refashion its approach.
Music, book-binding workshops and a dedicated young adult series have become mainstream events, as have more theatrical productions and specific subject themes to “cut through all the festival noise”.
Chief among those will be a recreation of the Scotch sitting room devised by the anarchic Scottish poet and writer Ivor Cutler featuring Hamish Hawk, who will present stories from his childhood and reworkings of Cutler’s work, accompanied by Cutler’s original harmonium.
On the festival’s final day the Hollywood stars Viggo Mortensen and Vanessa Redgrave will feature among a cast of celebrity speakers on stage reading fromThe People Speak, an anthology of famous speeches and polemics from around the world, drawn from a collection collated by the historians Anthony Arnove and Howard Zinn.
TheEdinburgh international book festivalruns from 9 to 24 August. Tickets go on sale on 21 June.