Edinburgh Book Festival: Yuri Herrera & Julia Rochester

Yuri Herrera is getting good mileage out of The Skinny's Books pages, and well he should. His novels are starting to trickle through to English language readers – starting with Signs Preceding the End of the World this year – and well they should. The Mexican-born, New Orleans-based writer’s profile is still relatively low, though, so he appeared at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in a small tent known as the Writers' Retreat, alongside debut English novelist Julia Rochester, author of The House at the Edge of the World. Both are up for the festival’s First Book Award.

The pairing was a decent fit. A point noted by chair Daniel Hahn, and it helped showcase the ideas of both writers rather than muddle them, as can often happen when you get an odd couple wedged onto the same stage. Though they share little biographical similarity, Herrera and Rochester converge in the ideas that populate their works. In the novels up for discussion, both deal with exile borne of personal circumstance, though Herrera’s is more concerned with the politics of nations, where in Rochester’s the focus is on family politics.

As well as a palpable sense of admiration from the audience – questions came thick and fast and were, for the most part, borne of interest rather than a desire to demonstrate superior insight – Rochester and Herrera displayed a sincere appreciation for one another’s work. She admired his ability to mine the US-Mexico border for history and meaning; he picked up on her description of getting rid of people as if shedding skin: a process that can be as painless as it is irreversible (he even knew the page to find it on). For their confident and canny work, for which both serve as able and humble spokespersons, either would be a deserving recipient of 2015’s First Book Award.

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Yuri Herrera and Julia Rochester were speaking at Edinburgh International Book Festival on 19 August.