A nation brought to book: The literary festivals boom

Gordon Brown believes they are a sign of a new seriousness in Britain. Publishers believe they raise their writers' profiles in a notoriously overcrowded market. And, most importantly, readers flock to them in ever-growing numbers with inquiring minds and open wallets.

The literary festival scene is undergoing a boom akin to that in the music industry, with new events mushrooming around the country to compete with venerable annual showcases like Hay-on-Wye, Oxford and Cheltenham.

From the revelation that London's South Bank Centre is to hold its first literary festival, attended by figures as diverse as the Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka and the children's author Lauren Child, to the unveiling of new events all over the UK, there are now more than 100 jamborees for the prose and poetry-obsessed every year.

While thousands will flock to the 450 music festivals in Britain this summer, contributing an estimated £500m to the economy, it seems there is a similar thirst for dub poets and multimedia memorials to literary greats.

As one music promoter with 15 years' experience put it: "I'm thinking of getting into book events. You don't realise how many people there are out there who want to spend a weekend in a tent, or maybe just an afternoon, chowing down about the latest hot writer or wanting to be in the same room as Simon Schama or Lauren Child." According to organisers and publishers, the crop of new festivals is testimony to the vibrancy of Britain's £2.7bn publishing industry as an ever increasing number of titles whets an appetite to meet authors and ask them about their work.

The first festival of Asian writing takes place in London this week with appearances by Kiran Desai, last year's winner of the Man Booker Prize, the broadcaster and India expert Sir Mark Tully and a range of emerging British Asian writers.

The expansion also reflects the increasing demand on authors, from heavyweights to obscure debutants, to get on the publicity treadmill and push their wares. Events can attract anything from 50 to 2,000 enthusiasts, and can increase a book's sales by as much as a quarter.

Liam Browne, who organises the literature element of the Brighton Festival and is programme director of the Dublin Writers' Festival, said: " Publishers will now often require an author to make a certain number of appearances to publicise the book. There is more pressure than ever on writers to perform. But it is part of an exciting and positive development. I think people want to engage more directly with writers beyond traditional media.

"And they are no longer passive audiences, these events are much more interactive than they used to be - people want to ask authors about their passions and challenge their preconceptions.

"The result is that in a festival like Brighton you can get very big audiences. We can fill a concert hall with 1,800 people. You can sell a lot of books but also you engage with a discerning and interested audience."

It is a fact which has not been lost on the prime minister-in-waiting. Last month Mr Brown cited the growing popularity of the festivals as proof of Britons' ennui with celebrity culture and their thirst for serious debate. He will have racked up three appearances at book festivals in as many weeks when he attends the Hay festival this week, having already made appearances at Brighton and Cheltenham in an apparent attempt to win back literary liberals angry about the war in Iraq.

But while Hay and Cheltenham can count on a ready audience - more than 130,000 attended last year's event on the Welsh borders - the new pretenders must try hard to set themselves apart from their competitors. With most established authors expecting to receive accommodation and/or an appearance fee up to £1,000, the costs of organising a festival can be substantial and the literary equivalent of a headline act is much sought after.

Organisers of the new Dundee Literary Festival hope the presence of the cult science fiction author Christopher Priest will attract crowds, while the Southbank Centre is offering Pat Barker, Jacqueline Wilson and Roger McGough.

The inaugural York Literature Festival this spring offered a fusion of 19th-century folk stories with songs and the new Coventry Festival of Literature and Liberty pitched itself at fans of works from the Caribbean.

In London, the organisers of the Southbank festival, due to begin on 29 June, feel the status of the centre, which celebrates the reopening of the Royal Festival Hall next month after a £91m refurbishment, as a cultural hub makes it a natural choice for an edgier and urban literary event.

Among the attractions will be an evening with reggae poets including Linton Kwesi Johnson, a multimedia celebration of the birth of W H Auden and a maze built from 1,000 soap boxes where visitors will encounter story-tellers and performance poets.

The plethora of choice for readers, who have seen the number of fiction and non-fiction titles published in Britain each year rise from 48,000 in 1980 to a current level in excess of 120,000, has been further boosted by the rise of "multi-discipline" festivals. The Port Eliot Lit Fest in Cornwall, now in its fifth year, has made a virtue of an eclectic line-up which has featured Louis de Bernières playing the mandolin and contests to design the most effective paper airplane.

The concept has been taken a step further by the Latitude festival in Southwold, Suffolk, which offers music, comedy, poetry, literature, cabaret and film. Among the entertainment will be a version of Book Slam, a monthly event held in London's Notting Hill where authors, known and unknown, gather to present their work at a nightclub venue for a 300-strong audience.

Mr Browne said: "You might begin to ask whether the market is there to sustain so many literary events. I think as long as they are well organised and professional the demand is there."

1. The Dundee Literary Festival

Where: Dundee University

When: 21 - 22 June

Page turners: Philip Pullman, Jacqueline Wilson, Christopher Priest and David Profumo.

Reading group: Sci-fi fans will flock to see Priest, while budding scribes can butter up publishing heavyweights Jenny Brown or Will Atkinson at the writers' workshop.

2. Scarborough Literature Festival

Where: Various venues in Scarborough

When: 20-22 April 2007

Page turners: A number of the UK's leading ladies: Maggie O'Farrell, Wendy Holden, best-selling author Adele Parks and humorist Katie Fforde.

Reading group: For fans of a cheap read, the second-hand book trail began at The Bookshelf and offered a guaranteed guide to the city's book bargains.

3. York Literature Festival

Where: Venues across York

When: 28 February - 15 March 2007

Page turners: Poet Oz Hardwick, playwright Alison Morgan and writer Miles Salter all made appearances.

Reading group: Musicians flocked to events fusing storytelling and song. "The Twisting Field", a 19th-century folk story, was combined with nine original songs.

4. Coventry Festival of Literature & Liberty

Where: Various venues across Coventry

When: 1-7 May 2007

Page turners: Poet Brian Patten, the keynote speaker, and Nobel Prize-winning novelist and playwright Wole Soyinka.

Reading group: World literature enthusiasts. Those reading included David Dabydeen, professor of Caribbean literature at Warwick University, and Guyanan-born novelist Tessa McWatt.

5. London Literature Festival

Where: Newly redone Southbank Centre

When: 29 June-12 July

Page turners: Roger McGough, Brian Patten, Simon Armitage, Martin Rowson, Michael Rosen, and Linton Kwesi Johnson.

Reading group: Everyone from dub poetry fans to children who want to see CBBC's Lauren Child.

6. Festival of Asian Literature

Where: Asia House, London

When: 21-25 May

Page turners: Mark Tully talks about his new book, India's Unending Journey, and the award-winning author, Pankaj Mishra, appears in conversation with Masoud Golsorkhi, editor of Tank magazine.

Reading group: Anyone interested in this rapidly rising section of literature. Don't miss the Booker Prize-winning author Kiran Desai.

7. Brighton Children's Book Festival

Where: Sallis Benney Theatre, University of Brighton

When: 21 April

Page turners: Nick Tucker, the author of The Rough Guide to Children's Books and Nicky Singer, author of the teen books Feather Boy and The Innocent's Story.

Reading group: Budding J K Rowlings and illustrators alike came to see artist Polly Dunbar delivering a guide to creating picture books.

A STORY OF ADORING FANS AND NATIONAL TREASURES

By John Walsh

There's something wrong with the whole idea of the literary festival: what, after all, have writing books and reading books - those quintessentially private and solitary activities - got to do with festivals, carnivals, audiences and crowds? If authors want to meet their public, shouldn't they do so in a series of one-to-one encounters, like a bookish confessional?

But logic has never been at the forefront of festival planning. For one thing, literary festivals are seldom confined to literature. Britain's first new-style annual bookfest took place in Cheltenham in 1949, where John Moore, a Tewkesbury-born auctioneer and chronicler of country life, invited some bookish chums from London to regale a small audience with chat about novel-writing and creativity. But he had the sense also to invite a famous actor, Ralph Richardson, to guarantee lots of bums on seats.

The core of the literary festival is still the Famous Writer (Preferably Foreign); at the Hay Festival, which celebrates its 20th birthday next weekend, they've got the playwright Wole Soyinka and the novelist Orhan Pamuk, both holders of the Nobel Prize. But you can hardly move, these days, for the crush of celebrities, film stars, TV comedians, book-friendly rock stars, chefs, cartoonists, soldiers with war memoirs, politicians extending their fan-base (Gordon Brown is visiting Hay) or, like John Major, testing out as lucrative new career.

Festivals used to be rather hushed and churchy affairs: a typical event might be 500 pilgrims travelling from miles away to hear Paul Theroux interview V S Naipaul, or Claire Tomalin introduce her biography of Jane Austen. I used to regard the events as something akin to the "Sacred Conversation" pictures of the Renaissance, where the viewer can only imagine the high-flown chat issuing from the Virgin Mary and her attendant saints; at book events, audiences expect a similar level of elevated insight from the high priests of British culture, from Julian Barnes and Marina Warner.

Festivals have become love-feasts for the TV-watching millions, at which national treasures and sweethearts meet their darlings. Michael Palin regularly faces thousand-strong audiences of rapturous fans all over the country. Ditto Judi Dench at Cheltenham, Jeremy Paxman at Edinburgh. When David Attenborough takes the stage at the Hay Festival on 2 June, I fear for the delicate hearing of the sheep on the hillsides, such will be the noise of cheering, sighing and ladylike swooning.

Peter Florence, director of Hay, has done more than anyone to promote the literary festival, until it seems every county in the UK must have a crack at entertaining Beryl Bainbridge and Sebastian Faulks for the week. Recently he's sold the idea of the festival in Bogota, Segovia, Alhambra and Cartegena. Other British-influenced festivals have sprung up in Jamaica, Jordan, Morocco and Brazil. There is no telling how far the phenomenon may go. But what began as a slightly weedy addition to the genteel English season has become a worldwide franchise that celebrates human thought, the written word, international communication. We should be proud to have had a considerable hand in its inception.