Wednesday 20 August 2008

Edinburgh Book Festival: Richard T Kelly & Nick Harkaway

I had a splendid time up in Edinburgh, thanks for asking. The Book Festival's set-up in Charlotte Square is really handsome and well-organised, the team first-rate, the hospitality lovely (streams of single malt...), and they draw great big crowds of curious book lovers.

I did my event with Nick Harkaway, author of The Gone-Away World, who is a top man and also blogs here. Festival director Catherine Lockerbie took the time to greet Nick and I before we went onstage, on a Saturday when a lot was going on for her, which was a touch of class. I was also pleased to make the acquaintance of Stuart Kelly, literary editor of Scotland on Sunday, who chairs various EIBF events and wrote very generously (not to say wittily) of Crusaders here.

On the Friday night I took in an LRB panel on The Novel wherein Andrew O'Hagan made some perfectly familiar and reasoned critical comments about our literary culture and its commercial obsessions, comments that were then reported Everywhere.

No comments: