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.

Richard T Kelly at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, August 16 2008

The programme for this year's Edinburgh Book Festival is now published and online. I'll be there, I'm pleased to say, and my joint event is billed as follows:

Nick Harkaway & Richard T Kelly
Saturday August 16 7:30 PM - 8:30 PM
First Fiction: A BOOKCASE EVENT
Two of the most talked about debuts of the year. Nick Harkaway, son of John Le Carré, pours massive exuberance into his giddying fantasy of a post-apocalyptic Britain, The Gone-Away World. Richard T Kelly's equally ambitious Crusaders is a socio-political epic, people struggling to survive in the run-down, swift-changing North of England."

So. Maybe I'll see you there...

I've not been in Edinburgh at Festival time since 2001 - the last of four years I did as consultant to the Film Festival, also Lizzie Francke's last as Artistic Director, and the year when Sean Penn came to town - that was certainly the start of something... Previous to that, I tried out the whole Edinburgh thing in a few different categories. I was part of the Young Programme-Makers sidebar of the Television Festival in 1996. Further back, in 1993, I directed a stage production of David Mamet's Edmond on the Fringe, with a team of young performers from Bristol University far more talented in that field than myself (among them Neil Cole, Claire Wille and Samantha LeMole, to speak only of those whom I know to have carried on performing.)

So, looking back, I have to say I gave it a go.