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Edinburgh book festival director discusses 'unprecedented' Baillie Gifford controversy
Jenny Niven, director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival (EIBF), has discussed the "unprecedented" Baillie Gifford controversy and forthcoming general election as the full line-up launches today (Tuesday 4th June).
The festival will run from 10th to 25th August under the theme ‘The Future Tense’ at a new home in the Edinburgh Futures Institute. Around 600 authors are featured across 500 events, including appearances from David Nicholls, Irvine Welsh, Amy Liptrot, Margaret Atwood and the 2023 Booker Prize winner Paul Lynch.
The festival has attracted controversy due to its headline sponsor Baillie Gifford’s ties to fossil fuel firms and Israel. After a mounting campaign by the Fossil Free Books collective, EIBF ended its two decades-long partnership with the investment manager last Thursday (30th June), with Niven citing “intolerable pressure” on the team. This came days after Hay Festival announced a similar decision.
Niven, who assumed the role of director in late 2023, conceded the impact of the controversy on her first festival. “It’s been a really unprecedented time and we’re facing challenges which are not run-of-the-mill for a festival," she told The Bookseller over Zoom. “We’ve been doing our best to navigate that and I’m hopeful that at some point we’ll come to a position where people feel they are able to just do book festival stuff again.
She added: “[The Fossil Free Books campaign] is also an expression of the strength of feeling that people have about these issues and we want to embrace that as much as we can.
“That’s why people write and share their words and ideas around this stuff and we would like people to feel that they can do that with us. But on the other hand it’s in the context of really challenging times, there’s lots of competing issues at play.”
Two months after outlining hopes for the festival, Niven hopes that today’s full line-up reveal will help to refocus the conversation. “We’re excited to get the programme out there because it speaks to many of the issues which have been wrapped in [the Baillie Gifford controversy] and we’re excited to answer some of the questions, or at least lean in to them, with some amazing writers and speakers who can help us think our way through these challenges.”
For the 2024 edition, EIBF has unveiled a partnership with Beyond Borders Scotland, a non-profit promoting international dialogue. As part of the partnership, Beyond Borders will host a series of events touching on themes including conflict resolution, peacemaking models and the ’Soft Power of Islam’. Niven believes that this year’s theme will enable the festival to “lean into these systemic challenges but hopefully find optimistic solutions to tackle them.”
The festival will be organised into six strands of focus, including The Future Library strand, with Margaret Atwood discussing practical utopias. Another strand dedicated to intergenerational issues will feature a conversation between poets Roger McGough and Hollie McNish among other events.
Niven is particularly excited to introduce a new strand which will be focused on food, including talks with chefs such as Rukmini Iyer and Rachel Roddy as well as a series of supper clubs. Late-night events will take place across Edinburgh’s famous Spiegeltent as part of the Back to Ours strand, including live podcast recordings and comedy nights which Niven hopes will attract new audiences "who attend other international festivals and the Fringe".
She anticipates the forthcoming general election being a prominent theme, too. On how the election announcement has impacted on the festival, she said: “It’s great because it means our programme can directly respond to what happens in the election, the festival is just a month later, we have people like Andy Burnham, Jess Philips, Caroline Lucas and Alistair Campbell, who can reflect on what has just happened and what will happen next.”
Overall, Niven is encouraged by the ticket sales so far: "We’re launching the rest of the programme [now] and so around 500 or so tickets won’t go on sale until 20th June," she said. "But we put our front-list on sale about six weeks ago and that’s been going brilliantly [in sales]—it’s looking really good."
For more information on the festival visit this link.
