After the international flavour of the Imprisoned Writers event yesterday, there's a more Scottish feel to this morning's Wake Up to Words session.
Kevin MacNeil makes a play for the sympathy vote, pleading a chest infection, though given the hostile reception in the Isle of Lewis to his novel, The Stornoway Way, "it's entirely possible that it's a form of bubonic plague visited upon me by the people of Lewis", he says. After all here he is, "doing a reading on a Sunday morning".
He grasps the book with both hands as he reads three short extracts that would make a minister blanch. Here in the Spiegeltent, the congregation sips coffee and nibbles calmly on a pastry as his reading covers drink, sex and the death of an unborn child.
The red velvet curtains remind novelist Suhayl Saadi of the film Moulin Rouge, and he's half-expecting "Kylie Minogue or Nicole Kidman to come swinging in", but his extract from Psychoraag is uninterrupted. His left hand lifts off from the lectern as his protagonist imagines taking flight, his right hand grasps a torch, flickers with the light of an old film and circles lazily to conjure up a cloud of dust.
The ceremony continues with questions from the floor. MacNeil doesn't think that he'll be "writing about Lewis forever".
"I didn't set out to solve Lewis's problems," he says. "I don't really believe in out-and-out messages in literature, but if there is one [in The Stornoway Way], it's about criticising extremes."
Saadi recognises the difficulties MacNeil faces. "If you're coming from what might be described as a minority community then people, especially people from that community, will be thinking that you should encapsulate everything about that community. They're going to be disappointed."
He likes the mirrors in the Spiegeltent, because they show "that there are always different viewpoints in every tradition. There are no monolithic traditions," he says.
Both authors use languages other than English to capture some of that complexity in their novels. Both have also included glossaries. "Most of the words are self-explanatory in the text," explains Saadi, but the glossary is "a place to expand or deviate."
"I wouldn't rely on my glossary," says MacNeil.
