A Dutch contemporary classical group will perform four pieces composed for Ali Smith’s work while she reads from it, as part of this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival. The festival is expanding its genre-busting musical events, including staging Japanese Noh theatre at Greyfriars Kirk, one of the city’s oldest religious sites.
Breaking the Traditional Mold
Jenny Niven, the festival’s director, said such events break away from the traditional formula of authors sitting in tents, aiming to attract new audiences and celebrate literature’s interplay with other art forms. “Books don’t have to be medicine,” she said.
The programme includes performances featuring Ali Smith, Kathleen Jamie, and William Dalrymple at Greyfriars Kirk, built in the early 1600s on grounds previously occupied by a 15th-century Franciscan monastery.
Scotland to the World
As part of the festival’s Scotland to the World strand, Jamie’s wildlife essay On Rona—about the remote Hebridean island North Rona—will be enacted by the minimalist Noh Reimagined theatre company and Scottish musicians Brìghde Chaimbeul (smallpipes) and Aidan O’Rourke (fiddle).
The New European Ensemble (NEuE) will play four pieces written for Smith’s work while she reads. In The Golden Road, Dalrymple’s histories of Scottish colonialism in India will accompany the fusion sounds of India Alba.
Embracing Diverse Consumption
Niven noted that fiction and literature are routinely consumed in different ways, including film adaptations, musical interpretations, and plays. This year’s festival also offers live cookery events with food writers, a strand pioneered in 2024. “It’s a huge programme and there’s absolutely space to play with different art forms,” she said. The impetus also comes from efforts to combat declining literacy and reading rates and competition from social media.
Previous Mixed-Genre Success
Niven has commissioned mixed-genre shows in previous roles, including poet Benjamin Zephaniah in a hip-hop production in Beijing, and Michael Palin in a bird house at Melbourne zoo. This year’s event features thriller writer John Grisham—author of The Pelican Brief and The Firm, with reputed sales of 500 million books—in conversation with Ian Rankin at the 1,000-seater McEwan Hall.
Serious Tone and Central Theme
Niven said this year’s festival has a deliberately serious tone, with “Changing your mind” as its central theme. “In a world where people are very certain of their positions about all sorts of issues, all kinds of polarised, in all kinds of ways, how do we stay flexible in our thinking? How do we open our minds to new ideas, new ways of thinking?” she said at the programme launch.
The festival is not “deliberately pitting polarised views against each other for spectacle or for a headline.” The aim is to programme authors and speakers with different views that audiences will seek out to challenge themselves.
Debates and Discussions
The UK Supreme Court ruling on the legal definition of sex, which has led to contested official advice about single-sex toilets from the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, will be debated in an event chaired by former Supreme Court President Brenda Hale. Guests include legal experts on both sides of the gender debate: Karon Monaghan KC, who represents gender critical groups, and Keio Yoshida, a barrister championing trans rights.
The festival also presents big-tech critic Cory Doctorow, author of Enshittification, in conversation with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. Steve Crossan, who worked on Google’s DeepMind AI project, will debate Alan Finkel, Australia’s former chief scientist and creator of the AI-free certification service ProudlyHuman.
Exploring New Technologies
Niven is excited about competing projects from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and Festivals Edinburgh to investigate new digital and data-mining technologies that could lead to a unified festivals box office or app. She stressed protecting the book festival’s specific identity and is agnostic about what technology could be introduced. “I’m open and I’m genuinely quite excited about the potential for these new tools to make more of what we have,” she said.
The Edinburgh International Book Festival runs from 15 to 30 August.
