Beer, Bookselling and Birds of Prey: Wigtown Book Festival preview
As Scotland's National Book Town hosts its annual Festival here's our guide to the vibrant programme of literary events in Wigtown, a town regenerated through the power of words.
While the sun has set on both Edinburgh International Book Festival and the Scottish summer itself, it would take a narrow, pessimistic mind to feel that the literary calendar was coming to a close, a wonderful year of words and ideas gradually enveloped by darkness. Bloody Scotland has just announced a record numbers of visitors to Stirling this year for their celebration of Scottish crime fiction while Wigtown – Scotland’s National Book Town – is limbering up for its own annual festival. It was awarded its title by the Scottish Parliament in the mid 90s and in the same year hosted its first Wigtown Book Festival. Since then the event has gone from strength to strength, attracting the wise and the wonderful of the literary world and entertaining an ever increasing audience.
The 2014 event runs from 26 September to 5 October, a 10 day celebration of literature. But Wigtown is about much more than single literary events, and as much about place and ethos. The town was quickly regenerated on being awarded its title and festival after languishing at its lowest ebb both culturally and economically in the 90s. Now transformed by the power of words, it is a place where you can spend a day, or ten, and take the experience beyond the festival venues (the Festival's pub quiz sounding an attractive combination of books and beer, and words and wine).
This year welcomes the wonderful novelist Linda Grant, talking about her new book Upstairs at the Party. Also attending is Linda Cracknell, a travel writer of sorts. Journeying on foot around Scotland’s landscape and painting it in our imaginations, she must be delighted with the wonderful picturesque setting of Dumfries & Galloway. Adding to an impressive line-up is the instant classic H is for Hawk, discussed here by its author Helen Macdonald. It's the unusual story of Macdonald's obsession with training a goshawk, a bird of prey native to Scotland's borders.
Wigtown – as book festivals should be – is a celebration of ideas, of understanding, enlightening and moving forward. The always essential Scottish PEN are using this platform in 2014 to discuss the Commonwealth, an epilogue to their earlier series of events alongside the Queens Baton Relay before Glasgow’s games. But all this is just a small peek into a full, vibrant and diverse programme.
Above and beyond all this, there is the chance to answer Wigtown’s call…
Wanted: Booksellers, no experience needed, for unique artistic project
Call for members of public to become booksellers in Scotland’s National Book Town
What does it mean to run a “real”, second-hand bookshop in the age of Amazon? Now there’s an easy way to find out. Wigtown is offering aspiring booksellers and artists the chance to experience the literary lifestyle in a unique series of residencies that will begin at this year’s Festival and continue for the next 12 months.
The Open Book project invites interested parties to apply to live in and run a local bookshop (renamed The Open Book) for a period of up to 6 weeks in Wigtown. Anyone is invited to apply, with preference given to artists, writers, thinkers, and bibliophiles. As well as keeping the shop open a set number of hours a week, the winner will be asked to contribute to a blog outlining their experiences, adding a page of their own lives to the story of Scotland's Book Town.