Denise Mina & Alan Warner @EIBF

 

This event was originally to have had a third author, Amy Bloom, but her cancellation left two, Alan Warner and Denise Mina. The event was based around the ‘Elsewhere’ theme, a reaction to the ‘Homecoming Scotland’ initiative of 2009. Though Mina and Warner’s pieces were both were only loosely themed around the notion of ‘Elsewhere’, that was fine – the whole concept was just a jumping-off point for a story. Now, all of this is fine, but when two authors read, one after the other, it’s probably wrong, but completely irresistible, to compare the two, to see who ‘wins’. Up first was Denise Mina, with a piece about queuing for hours to get on a connecting flight, a story she admitted was almost completely true. Her reading was excellent, drew a couple of big laughs, and though she’d written about what was a dull situation, her story was never dull. Warner followed with a story about a man who’d left instructions in his will that his ashes were to be scattered on a beach (in the Western Isles) by a beautiful woman in a bikini, riding a horse. This drew a large number of laughs, and so Warner probably edged it. Let’s make it official then – fiction beats non-fiction. Sorted. [Keir Hind]