Anticipating and securing the “hot tickets” is always the toughest task of the festival programmer, but it’s particularly challenging for the Edinburgh international book festival, which opens just days after the agenda-setting Man Booker longlist is revealed. So there were smiley faces all round when the organisers discovered that they had bagged six of the 13 writers who had made this year’s “Booker dozen”. Sebastian Barry, Zadie Smith, Paul Auster and Ali Smith duly entertained sellout crowds in the festival’s biggest arena, while Jon McGregor commanded the rather smaller Studio theatre. But it is a mark of the trickiness of programming that Colson Whitehead – whose Pulitzer prize-winning The Underground Railroad is tipped in some quarters to be the next Booker winner – had been scheduled for a double-header with his fellow American Laird Hunt in the “informal” space of the Spiegeltent (though a brief reading was shoehorned into the early morning session in the same venue the next day for those lucky enough to spot it).
The double-header is universal festival shorthand for almost-maybe-but-in-the-end-not-quite-box-office-enough-to-take-a-risk-on. And fair enough, festival economics are scary. So what of the triple-header? In Edinburgh, this is reserved for poets and the more edgy selections of the guest curators.
Consider “21st Century Women”, from the “Intersections of Identity and Culture” strand curated by the Scottish poet and Makar Jackie Kay and the American cultural activist Roxane Gay: an Argentinian story of a transvestite who renounces prostitution after being “visited” by the Virgin Mary; an Icelandic writer’s dialogue with the man who raped her 20 years earlier; and a short story collection by an unknown New Zealand writer of Samoan, Mangaian and Irish descent.
These spaces might apparently be marginal but they have a beautiful potential. I first spotted the now celebrated Madeleine Thien in one. Watch out for New Zealander Courtney Sina Meredith and her compatriots, who were out in force at the festival. Who knows, they may one day return as part of the Booker Dozen.
