This year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival aims to explore the changing face of the Middle East with talks by a varied line-up of authors from the Arab world and beyond. Festival director Nick Barley tells what he hopes it will achieve
When the Edinburgh International Book Festival invited Middle Eastern authors to talk about “the unravelling of the old order” last year, organisers were expecting a retrospective look at the aftermath of the controversial Sykes-Picot agreement a century ago.
What emerged instead was a fresh narrative about the rapidly evolving Arab region, which surprised many. It proved so popular with audiences that the Middle Eastern theme has been revived this year.
Those voices have been brought together in a new book called Shifting Sands, which will be launched at this year's festival. The collective of 15 authors, collated by Palestinian lawyer and author Raja Shehadeh, lend their insights into how the last century has shaped the region, from the catastrophic divisions after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire to the turmoil of the Arab Spring, and articulate their hopes for the future.
When the festival kicks off on Saturday with a series of talks on the new theme of “the changing Middle East”, it aims to shift the debate away from the “bullet holes and bloodstains and corpses” that western audiences are used to seeing on TV news bulletins, says festival director Nick Barley.
“In Europe, nobody really knows how much of that is part of everyday life but if you look at the media, you would imagine that is all you would ever see if you were walking through a city in the Middle East,” he says.
“It is about trying to rebalance that. My feeling is there is a perception that the Middle East is in a state of crisis, but there is a confusion about what exactly that means, and an uncertainty about how that situation can be resolved outside [the region].
“The discussions last year were so interesting to me because they made me realise my perception of the Middle East – and I assume my perception is similar to other people in Europe – is over-simplistic and clichéd.
“Despite all the difficulties in the Middle East, there is creativity and imagination in the writing community, and the possibility of imagining solutions – even if we cannot see what those are yet.”
Feedback from last year’s talks was “some of the best we have ever had”, he says, and many of the Middle East-themed events at this year’s festival have already sold out.
The dozen authors speaking at this year’s event, set in a tented village in the rarefied Georgian setting of Charlotte Square in the Scottish capital, include the Palestinian writer Ghada Karmi, the British journalist Jason Burke, the Pakistani author Ziauddin Sardar and the Lebanese author Elias Khoury.
Former hostage Terry Waite will give a talk on his years in captivity in Lebanon and his new comic novel, while Carole Hillenbrand, the first non-Muslim to be awarded the King Faisal International Prize for Islamic studies, will hold a session on understanding Islam.
They are among the 800 authors speaking at more than 700 sessions during the 17-day festival.
Barley says the event, which attracts 225,000 visitors each year, avoids taking a political stance. He has included Palestinian and Israeli writers in the line-up “so we are not starting out with a fixed perception of what the answers are”.
The director decided which voices should represent the Middle East through his connections with other literary festivals, editors, authors and publishers from around the world.
“My programming comes very often from conversations I have when I travel around the world,” says Barley.
Authors last year discussed what it meant to be a Middle Eastern writer and whether such a generic term was really relevant.
Barley says that while there is a danger of festival directors in the West relying on the same tried-and-tested voices as being representative of the region, he was keen to find fresh talent and had included 55 debut authors across the festival as a whole.
“That was why I invited [Shehadeh] to help last year,” he says. “Some of the people he wanted to invite are definitely not on that list of already international superstars.
“It was a really interesting selection because the risk is that literary festivals tend to rely on a network centred around London and New York.
“I try to get away from that as much as I can but I cannot completely remove myself from it.”
Shifting Sands was inspired by the talks last year but each of the writers – including the newly published Kuwaiti author Mai Al Nakib and the Syrian-American writer Malu Halasa – wrote new essays for the book.
The “changing Middle East” theme, says Barley, was triggered by “the desire to get away from a state of apparently never-ending and unresolvable conflict”.
“The overarching sense from these writers is a desire to try to rethink the whole region,” he says.
And while the tranquil, salubrious setting of Edinburgh’s Charlotte Square Gardens is thousands of miles from the turbulence of the region, Barley says literary festivals help to create vital democratic forums around the world.
“They create a space where you can be part of the shaping rather than just being shaped by your circumstances and that is why they are so powerful,” he says.
• The Edinburgh International Book Festival runs from Saturday to August 31. For more details and a full list of events, visit edbookfest.co.uk
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