Aye Write! A Most Succesful Festival.

The Third Aye Write! International Book Festival was well run, well attended, and extremely enjoyable. The setting helped - The Mitchell Library is the ideal venue for this event, with its grand Main Hall, smaller rooms for more intimate events, and Theatre for the biggest draws. But it's more than that – the audiences were agreeably mixed, with a number of different age groups in evidence at virtually every event I attended. The audience for The Scottish Poetry Slam Championship, on the opening evening, certainly had a young average age, but the odd grey hair could still be spotted, and all present had a good time. There were plenty of talented performers here, but the reasons for the scoring went unexplained. This made the competition seem a little forced. If classical poetry can be compared to boxing, then the judging process made this pro-wrestling. But I'm bitter - I thought they should have all won prizes.

A marked contrast to this was the event on March 10th, 100 Years of Scottish Photography, where Tom Normand's talk on photography was complemented with an understated poetry reading by Norman Bissell. This was taken from Slate, Sea and Sky, a new book where his poems run alongside Oscar Marzaroli photographs. This pairing produced an informative and pleasant talk. In fact, the author pairings I saw were typically very successful. Less successful was an event in the Main Hall on the 11th where four authors appeared together- Michael Schmidt, Laura Marney, Kei Miller, and Zo" Strachan. This was a showcase for work from creative writing courses, but the event seemed too crowded – any one or two of these writers could have quite easily had their own event. 'Undercover Economist' Tim Harford appeared on his own two days later, and gave a very informative hour-long talk on economics as the study of risk and reward, rather than exclusively money. I enjoyed it so much that I bought his book and had it signed, during which he told me that signing the book could make it very valuable – if he died that night. He didn't. Ah well.

Iain M Banks and Ken Macleod were good value together on the 9th, in the Mitchell Theatre. Both read sections from their new books, and talked about their schooldays together in Greenock. Banks revealed that his current and next sci-fi novels are about The Culture (his pan-galactic utopian socialist society) and MacLeod revealed that he tries to write contemporary fiction, but the sci-fi always creeps in at the planning stage. An eager audience were ready to ask a lot of questions, but (my only complaint) time ran out too quickly. This happened all too often – Meagan Delahunt and Alan Spence actually overran by at least 15 minutes. Here I was fascinated when Spence mentioned that he felt a part of his novel The Pure Land had been 'given' to him, communicated 'in some way' as if by 'the soul of Japan'. I don't exactly disagree, but again I wished that that phrase 'in some way' had been examined further. By what process?

I ask because a day earlier, Chris Brookmyre and Mark Billingham had disparaged writers who similarly mystified the writing process, writers who 'need a slap'. They didn't directly contradict what Spence had said, but I'd like to see them debate. Anyway, Brookmyre and Billingham made it their business, as they do in their books, to be entertaining. They quickly dispensed with reading sections from their books, and got on to telling stories about being an author and reading the wacky emails they'd been sent, and their own bad reviews. They also made plenty of time for questions, but time still ran out too quickly. This was still, easily, the most amusing event of the festival.

For me, the most affecting event of the festival was the event for Archie Hind. Hind authored one book, The Dear Green Place, in 1966 (see review below). He was due to appear at Aye Write! to talk about the book's re-release, which features the remaining fragment of his follow-up, Fur Sadie, but he died shortly before. So his friend Alasdair Gray, with journalists John Linklater and Alan Taylor gave readings from the books (Gray was especially good) and talked about Archie as they knew him. And again, time ran out too soon. An appeal was made at the end for any copies of scripts or stories by Hind – and I've already found some in the Scottish Theatre Archive. I'd tell you more, but I've ran out of time too.