Lessons from Lit-Fests

In the last week there have been at least three: Hay Segovia, Berlin and Warwick. Next week sees the start of Cheltenham, the continuation of Beverly and Manchester’s. I’m talking, of course, about literary festivals. New ones seem to appear in the most unlikely of places and yet there seem to be no end of consumers ready to hand over a few pounds to see both the famous and the less so talking and reading about their work. Whether in a tiny Scottish town or a big international city, the events proliferate, the banners are hung and the audience comes. Plant a literary tree it seems, and it will grow.

And for those towns where a festival works, Hay being the most notable, the economic effect can be astonishing. Ten years ago Wigtown in Scotland won the bid to call itself Scotland’s book town. Another, Dalmellington, lost. Whereas the former has seen over £10m of public investment injected into regenerating the town, and has just welcomed names such as Janice Galloway and Louis de Bernières at its tenth festival, its once rival laments the loss of ‘the biggest hook to …get people off the A713’. Having just returned from Segovia, where I watched the city fill with Madrid’s middle-classes, students from the University of Valladolid, and a smattering of British media, I can see that even in this already well-known tourist destination, the burnish of a literary link can bring rewards. The trains from Madrid and the nicest hotels were all fully booked and the streets and venues were crammed with visitors clutching the programme, queuing to see the famous and the less so. Even though most of the audience were Spanish-speaking and many of the events were being translated from French, German and English, everyone listened with patience as a question was spoken in one language, translated into another, then replied to in the second for the reply to be translated back into the first…

And all of this effort and activity for books. Whilst we publishers wring our hands about what will happen to our consumers in the future, as e-readers and digital content dominate our conferences and trade magazines, the audience is still there, still growing, and busy filling wet tents in Wales and beautiful buildings in Spain. What the popularity, and proliferation, of these events, suggests is that there remains a large, and growing, appetite for literature’s practices and performance. Whether writing, reading or debating, there remains a desire to know both the writer and the written and such festivals show that even though the book industry is constantly looking for new ways to widen its markets, often the route to inspiring and holding a reader, and hopefully a consumer, is the same as it has always been: tell a good story, in person or on the page.

Yes, the future of publishing might lay in new, and as yet unknown, products, but its past and present ones still resonate. There are those who love, and buy, the object, others who want just the words, but what they share is a desire for narrative, for a story created by a writer who can describe human, or not so human, experiences anew. We are one of the few industries, along with the music industry, that maintains a commercial imperative but offers a cultural experience. The literary festival already understands that the relationship between reader and writer, whatever the means of delivery, remains one of interest, fascination and enjoyment. Instead of bemoaning the loss of our past, and fearing our future, we should celebrate the privileged present that we occupy — the fact that we not only create new books but also new writers and readers — and find new ways, as festivals do, of exploiting it.