The Spiegeltent, Consignia Theatre, Field and Lawn Marquee, Studio Theatre and Children’s Theatre are all based in Charlotte Square Gardens. The box office number is 0131 624 5050 and website is www.edbookfest.co.uk
Thursday 15
Eoin McNamee, John Boyle 8. Carl MacDougall Spiegeltent. 70.30am, £7 (£5). As the Scots and Irish plan to host Euro 2008. here is another celtic connection. We particularly recommend John Boyle's Galloway Street. a tale of growing up on the mean streets of Paisley. Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones 8. Ziauddin Sardar Field and Lawn Marquee, 77am, £7 (£5). The CIA and notions of freedom are discussed by these two erudite critics of the USA. Michael Holroyd Consignia Theatre. 7 7.30am, £7 (£5). How can yOu attack and defend biography at the same time? The esteemed writer Michael Holroyd (aka Mr Margaret Drabble) tries it with Works on Paper.
John Burnside & Brian Clarke Studio Theatre, noon, £7 (£5). Ecology is at the forefront of these two writers' minds in a Green and Gold event. Barbara Trapido 8: Christopher Hope Consignia Theatre, 7.30pm, £7 (£5). The beauty and the beastliness of South Africa is a central concern of these authors.
tmlf‘ifii WORDS
RESOLUTION
‘She'd have to watch her time. There was only one English- speaking AA meeting per week in St Petersburg and it began in an hour. She hadn’t been sober long enough to go a week without one.
He sat down next to her on the bench and took her hand lightly in his.
“All right?" she whispered, still looking out of the window. “Are ye having a good time?"
“Aye.” said Vik. “Oh, aye.“
I Denise Mina & Manda Scott, Studio Theatre, 78 Aug, noon, £7 (£5).
Alexander McCall Smith Studio Theatre, 2pm, £7 (£5). Keep an eye on your TV sets for the forthcoming adaptation of his Precious Pamotswe adventures. and before he gets ridiculously famous. catch the eloquent AM Smith doing his reading thing.
Meaghan Delahunt 8- Kirsty Gunn Field and Lawn Marquee, 2.30pm, £7 (£5). Two authors who have made their home in Edinburgh. Australian Delahunt won praise for her debut In the Blue House while New Zealander Gunn's work includes this year's Featherstone.
Kathleen Jamie Consignia Theatre, 3pm, £7 (£5). Jamie once said that 'a wee bit of disorder never did any harm‘. Subscribe to her chaos theory as she tells of her journey across the globe which inspired Among Muslims. Seamus Heaney: The Trance and The Translation Studio Theatre. 3.30pm, £7 (£5). The Nobel Prize winner is actually making his debut appearance at the Book Festival and for that we must give thanks. Neith. Field Work and Station Island are among his acclaimed collections.
Michel Faber & Yann Martel Field and Lawn Marquee. 4pm, £7 (£5). Martel wrote one of the oddest novels of the year with A Life of Pi, which was favourably compared to Moby-Dick and Gulliver's Travels by Margaret Atwood while Faber's debut novel from a couple of years back Under the Skin made readers simultaneously smile and vomit. Michael Holroyd, Victoria Glendinning & Michael Crick Consignia Theatre, 4300/77, £7 (£5). The biographical art is considered by a trio of the form's finest exponents. Paul Eddy 8- John Creed Studio Theatre, 5pm, £7 (£5). There's nothing like a good old taut thriller, is there? And investigative journo turned author Eddy is one of the current crop of fine exponents. As is Eoin McNamee who chooses to write in this genre as Creed.
Ian Beck on Edward Lear Children '3 Theatre, 6pm, £3.50. Writer, artist and verse writer Lear was the king of nonsense in the Victorian era. Here. illustrator Beck explores this odd talent.
Mike Watson Consignia Theatre. 6.30pm, £8 (£6). The Minister for Tourism, Culture and Sport delivers the inaugural Donald Dewar Lecture. Michael Crick on Alex Ferguson Studio Theatre, 7pm, £8 (£6). Govan lad Sir Alex has made his indelible mark on British football. but what will he do when he retires in two years? His controversial biographer discusses the man and his ever-changing moods. See Top 5. page 12. Nature’s Revenge: Hurricanes, Floods and Climate Change Spiege/tent, 7.30pm, £8 (£6). It feels like Scotland's had the lot over the last few weeks. but what's at stake in this debate is much bigger than a few unseasonal showers. Is the planet seriously under threat or have we all been over-reacting to global change? Philip Norman Children '3 Theatre. 7.30pm, £8 (£6). The Stones and the
JANICE GALLOWAY
19th century music from the inside
_ ‘They think I we’re weirdoes looking for klcks’
Clara is an extraordinary novel. Janice Galloway has taken the story of Clara Schumann, the celebrated 19th century composer and concert pianist, and turned it into a work of mesmerising fiction. It is not ‘true’ in the academic sense, but by giving voice to her characters’ internal lives, Galloway has found a poetic truth that is entirely credible.
At over 400 pages of dense and demanding prose (what she calls ‘very long sentences that are almost disconnected thinking’), the novel is a bold departure for Galloway. So how did she go about combining biography’s meticulousness with fiction’s passion? ‘This is a novel,’ says Galloway. ‘And one of the things a novel legitimises you to do is to create a psychology. I’m making up a Clara Schumann, but she’s made up from factual details from someone real. If you’re dealing with real life, you have to pay it the respect of doing as much research as you can. It’s psychological detective work.’
But a biographer she is not. ‘A biographer has to rely not on the gaps between the diaries and letters, but the words themselves,’ she says. ‘They’re never able to do what people do in real life, which is evade, obfuscate, tell outright porkies. Which is why I could never write one, because I think people’s lives are written in those empty spaces. The bigger truths of your life are the silences, the things you don’t say or the things you don’t realise until you’re much older.’
In this way, Clara is all about the silences, the speechless years of the childhood-Clara connecting directly to the internal monologues of her adult self. It’s about feelings and impulses as much as dates and events. It’s the story of a talented woman swapping devotion from her father to her husband, bearing eight children and remaining stoic through Robert’s manic depression.
‘It is fairly obvious to me when you read the diaries, that Clara Schumann was gluing him together,’ says the author of The Trick is to Keep Breathing. ‘Having spoken to a lot of manic people, that illness suddenly made a lot more sense of Schumann. It made a lot more sense of the man and a lot more sense of the woman.’
So where will this experiment lead her next? ‘lt’s an exciting thing to find you can write in a different way, a different period of history, a different country with different social expectations,’ says Galloway, the librettist for Sally Beamish’s Monster earlier this year. ‘It makes you think that you can broaden out what you do.’
As if to prove the point, she’s now collaborating with sculptor Anne Bevan on a study of gynaecological instruments and birth processes. ‘We’re fighting tooth and nail to get into gynaecology wards in Scotland,’ she says with a mixture of laughter and frustration. ‘They think we’re weirdoes looking for kicks.’ (Mark Fisher)
I Spiegeltent. l 7 Aug, 70.30am, £7 (£5).
Beatles' biographer muses on the More travel and exploration as these
good old days.
Seamus Heaney Cons/grim Theatre. 8pm. £8 (£6). See 3.30pm. today
Peter Kerr & Christopher Hope Studio Theatre. 8.30pm. £8 (£ 6).
two writers chat about their experiences of Majorca (Kerr) and the 80th of France (Hope).
Spiegelbar Spiege/lenl. 9pm, free. Finish your day's literary musings with lltUSIC. booze and chat.
‘5- 1)? Aug 2002 THE LIST FESTIVAL GUIDE 1 1