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list.co.uk/festival Previews | FESTIVAL BOOKS
HOLLY BAXTER & RHIANNON COSSLETT The Vagenda duo comes to Edinburgh
Feminist heroines or ‘smug’ and ‘anti-women’? The editors of hugely popular website The Vagenda are used to raising eyebrows. Now the blog has spawned a book - The Vagenda: A Zero Tolerance Guide to the Media. Fed up of simply laughing at women's magazines that tell you how to get rid of cellulite using coffee
granules or how you should be pleasing your man, Holly Baxter and Rhiannon Cosslett decided to start their own version in 2012. ‘It was literally an overnight success - the media were covering it within the week and we were invited to debate the editor of Cosmopolitan,’ says Baxter. The two women had been friends since university and Baxter was living in Cosslett's airing cupboard - like a feminist Harry Potter - fruitlessly searching for media jobs. ‘We set it up because we had nothing to lose,’ she says frankly. The editors who didn't hire them back in 2012 must be kicking themselves. Since then, they have collaborated with Elle to improve their coverage and Stylist magazine have
said that Vagenda inspired them to no longer run diet articles. Although their articles frequently go viral, it's their work with schools and universities, discussing feminism with the journalists and readers of tomorrow, that the dynamic duo are really proud of: ‘We have 13 year old girls who had never considered feminism before. That's where you can see you're having an effect on people.’ So where next? Baxter is fuming that equal pay is still out of reach and says that Vagenda is
committed to helping end FGM. ‘Really,’ she says sadly, ‘I want to make us irrelevant.’ They may have a long way to go before every magazine meets their standards but until then, viva la Vagenda. (Kaite Welsh) ■ Charlotte Square Gardens, 0845 373 5888, 14 Aug, 8.30pm, £10 (£8). Word Power Books, 622 9112, 15 Aug, 1pm, free.
NATALIE HAYNES & HELEN WALSH Stand-up comic sets first novel in Edinburgh
‘It had to be set in Edinburgh,’ says stand-up comedian turned author, Natalie Haynes about her debut novel, The Amber Fury, a story of grief interwoven with the Greek tragedies, published earlier this year. ‘It sets the right tone for a thriller. Edinburgh can feel quite claustrophobic, with the castle and the crags looking down, making you feel watched. It’s also a place where I’ve felt grief- stricken; I found out my grandfather had died while I was performing there one August.’ Haynes, who will appear at the Book Festival with
Lemon Grove author Helen Walsh, is used to bringing comedy shows to the Fringe. So when describing her book, the first thing she says is, ‘It’s not funny. I wouldn’t want to mislead anyone. Not that there aren’t laughs in there, I can’t resist a laugh, however cheap!’ A former classics student at Cambridge, Haynes says she retired from stand-up because, ‘she preferred tragedy to comedy’. ‘As Aristotle would tell you, comedy and tragedy are both very cathartic,’ she says. ‘This is my love letter to Edinburgh, a place that can seem stern and dour, when actually it has an enormously kind heart.’ (Claire Sawers) ■ Charlotte Square Gardens, 0845 373 5888, 21 Aug, 10.15am, £10 (£8).
BRYAN LEE O’MALLEY Scott Pilgrim author offers us Seconds
Canadian comics artist Bryan Lee O’Malley is the writer and illustrator of the bestselling Scott Pilgrim series, a six-volume epic that established him as a master at combining intimate, personal characterisation with fantastical storytelling on a huge scale (with great jokes too). His new book Seconds is a standalone, full colour graphic novel about Katie, a 29-year old chef who wants a new start, and it considers the question of whether life would be better if you could take a second shot at the bits you messed up. It’s a distinctly more mature take on the world than the gaming-obsessed, emotionally-pinballing perspective of Scott Pilgrim, albeit just as packed with O’Malley’s visual wit and crackling dialogue. But despite on the surface appearing to be a smaller tale, Seconds is actually even more ambitious than Scott Pilgrim, and as O’Malley recently told the Nerdist podcast, the four-year process of the book’s creation was anything but simple: ‘There was a lot of sitting on my couch and just feeling frustrated – it’s a pretty complicated story, and requires a certain amount of maths from me as the writer! It’s kind of a time-travel story, so it has layers to it. I was obsessed with Inception at the time.’
‘Inception meets the Brothers Grimm’ could be the pitch for Seconds, as Katie is befriended by a house-elf who grants her the power to identify key mistakes from her life then go back and correct them – but with certain costs attached.
O’Malley’s stories brilliantly balance
imaginative fantasy with mundane reality, and the crossover between life and fiction will undoubtedly come up during his event at the Edinburgh International Book Festival this month. It’s a rare opportunity to hear from one of the comics world’s most singular talents, and not to be missed. (Paul Gallagher) ■ Charlotte Square Gardens, 0845 373 5888, 17 Aug, 4.30pm, £10 (£8).
14–25 Aug 2014 THE LIST FESTIVAL 37