Edinburgh International Book Festival: Edinburgh World Writers' Conference Event

Last year, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the landmark 1962 Edinburgh Writers’ Conference, the Edinburgh International Book Festival (in conjunction with the British Council and other supporters) instigated the Edinburgh World Writers’ Conference. In five sessions across five days, some 50 authors from around the world came together to discuss (in front of a public audience) the same five topics that had almost brought writers to blows half a century earlier: Should literature be Political?, Style Vs Content, National Literature, Censorship, and The Future of the Novel. Broadcast globally online, the discussions started in Charlotte Square were subsequently echoed and developed in a series of literary events run during 2012 and 2013, located in some 15 cities and four continents. 

Precisely a year since the first session ended, the Writers’ Conference returned to Charlotte Square – albeit in a slightly smaller tent. Chair Susanna Nicklin came to the stage with Sema Kaygusuz, Hari Kunzru and one of the Conference’s key-speakers (in both Edinburgh and Canada) China Miéville. Following a year of global literary discussions, which Nicklin believed had helped give many participants a more "internationalist" view of their work and readers, the question hung in the air: are we anywhere nearer a new understanding of the future of the novel? (Assuming it has one, of course.)

Well, the overriding conclusion from the Conference’s globe-trotting journey would appear to be that the novel does, indeed, have a future; it is, as Miéville suggested back in 2012, “as tenacious as a cockroach.” That said, it was important that ‘the novel’ should not be the sole preserve of authorial expression; Kaygusuz pointed out that short stories and poetry have their place in literary expression and are often more apt, more immediate, in our rapidly-changing world. In Turkey, for example, she felt that novels are necessarily more retrospective; they have a certain scale that requires time for the “grapes” of events and social change to be fermented into the “wine” of new novels.

In terms of narrative expression, of course, the novel no longer stands alone; writers can often find themselves collaborating with artists in other media, including cinema and television. Kunzru was brought in at this point to explain his experience of working on a novella and exhibition commissioned by the Victoria & Albert Museum, Memory Palace. He found it quite a liberating experience, because of – rather than despite –the formal constraints imposed on him by the way people would experience the narrative in a non-linear form.

Collaboration of a different kind was something Miéville had suggested back in 2012, with new digital publishing technology enabling readers to take a far more direct involvement in their favourite text, possibly even creating “literary mash-ups” of other people’s work. However, he accepts that there is also a counter pressure on this kind of thing; the big narrative ‘brands’ found in comics, films, computer games and so forth are themselves limited by commercially-imposed constraints designed to preserve and maintain their brand integrity. 

When the conversation was widened to include the audience, Miéville also admitted that he feels somewhat ambivalent about another form of literary collaboration, ‘fanfic’ – i.e. non-professional fiction set within the worlds of the authors’ favourite books. Unlike some authors, he’s not against it, and accepts that such enthusiastic writing can be of real commercial benefit to a 'Property’s' owner. It simply “doesn’t ring his bell;” as a reader, he prefers to read something new. 

Miéville also pointed out that fears about the consequences of digital publishing, and how it could destroy the traditional publishing model, already seemed to be fading in just one year. He takes a somewhat Darwinian view that good writing will still survive; that, indeed, publishing houses could even become more trusted as gatekeepers given the glut of writing now being published digitally. Fears about the ‘signal to noise‘ ratio – the amount of stuff worth reading compared to that which isn’t – are overblown; he accepts that he, personally, can’t read everything that’s good, but that’s actually been the case for more than a century already.

If there was a conclusion of sorts to this particular event, it was that – regardless of our multi-media, multi-format future – there will still be a place for the novel, whatever particular form it might take. As Kunzru pointed out, although some people point to the box-set TV drama as the successor to the novel, the truth is that the likes of The Wire are still very much following the templates established in the 19th century, rather than the 21st. For as long as prose fiction can still do things that visually-based media can’t, the novel will be with us: to use Kaygusuz’s expression, a "discovery" rather than an "invention" that can be rediscovered anew.