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Yet another field of battle: literary festivals.
Last week, in the days leading up to the Hay Literary Festival – the UK’s most prestigious literary event which, each May since 1987, has brought together high-profile speakers from across the world – a crisis was unfolding.
Those scheduled to appear had received an email from an organisation called Fossil Free Books, urging them to protest against the festival over its sponsorship deal with the Edinburgh-based investment firm Baillie Gifford. The email asked them to denounce Baillie Gifford – which invests two per cent of its portfolio in the petrochemical industry and which, FFB argue, also profits from “Israeli apartheid, occupation and genocide” – or read aloud a poem by a Palestinian author, or withdraw from Hay entirely.
Speakers were also encouraged to sign a letter of protest, while a second email gave details of several pro-Palestinian demonstrations scheduled to take place at the festival, with details on how speakers could support them. Various publicists and publishers found the tone of this email “quite threatening”. There was unease about safety concerns, and that authors would find themselves caught up in the protests.
Well look at it from the point of view of the activists. How much trouble is it to send a bullying email to lots of people compared to actually doing something useful?
Speaking at Hay on Thursday on the subject of control being exerted over the arts, the novelist Howard Jacobson said: “The idea that anybody can come along and say ‘you can’t read this and you can’t read that’… is a desecration. It’s a desecration of books, it’s a desecration of the idea of literature”. He also described feeling “sorry for the people who organise this festival, because they have been subjected to the most cruel and objectionable pressure.”
And frankly it just seems too meta to make any difference to climate change. There are too many steps. It looks more like performing Doing Something as opposed to actually doing something.
Toby Mundy, who runs the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, previously known as the Samuel Johnson Prize – the £50,000 prize is run entirely independently from Baillie Gifford, who merely provide “a substantial sum” to finance it – says: “I was dismayed and disappointed that [Hay] chose to make this decision. Baillie Gifford play an indispensable role in the cultural life of this country. They fund public spaces in the form of book prizes and literary festivals where issues can be debated openly, without seeking to control in any way what happens in those spaces.”
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“People with very strong views feel they have the right to impose them on other people. It puts institutions like Hay in a very difficult position,” says the novelist Joan Smith, who last appeared at Hay in 2019. “It’s authoritarian. It worries me that individual authors will find themselves under pressure to sign their statement for fear that, if they don’t, people will think they are a climate-change denier. Yet it’s very hard to see how the call to cut ties with Baillie Gifford will have the slightest influence on climate change. The Middle East in particular is far too complex a situation to be solved by these sorts of single-issue campaigns.”
What I’m saying. It’s drama rather than really doing something. I suppose there’s an argument that all such actions are about raising awareness and thus worth doing, but there’s also an argument that they’re just performances.
Baillie Gifford argues that the accusations levied against its investments are misleading. They point out that its two per cent investment in the petrochemical industry is far below the industry average, which is five to 11 per cent. Mundy, who as a member of the Baillie Gifford Prize board regularly carries out due-diligence checks, suggests that Baillie Gifford also “invest much more than that in companies working in clean energy”.
Ok but on the other hand punishing Baillie Gifford is easier than working in clean energy.
The Adelaide Writers’ Week is an annual event that brings together authors and readers from around the world. It is a part of the wider Adelaide Festival of the Arts held biannually since 1960 and annually since 2012. Each year it highlights just how important writing and reading are to a nation’s cultural, social, and political life.
For the last three years, its Director has been Louise Adler, the daughter of Jewish immigrants who arrived in Australia in 1949. Loiuse’s mother, Ruth, escaped the NAZI persecution of German Jews, however, Ruth’s extended family were all murdered in the Holocaust. Louise’s paternal grandfather died in Auschwitz.
And every year she has been Director, Louise has had to fight off shrill Jewish agitators who lose their minds at a Palestinian author being included in the program. Not a terrorist, not a leader or foot soldier of Hamas, but a simple blackener of pages who happens to be Palestinian. One of this year’s major sponsors, a law firm, withdrew its sponsorship over the inclusion of novelist and scholar Susan Abulhawa and poet Mohammed El-Kurd, the former a critic of Vlodomir Zelensky, the latter a critic of Zionism.
Meanwhile, at the Hay Festival, one of Australia’s most respected journalists commented that Australia certainly has a racist streak and the racists crawled out from under the rocks to prove her right.
Laura Tingle is the ABC’s Chief Political Correspondent and the staff-elected Board Member, but at the Hay Festival she was speaking as a private citizen, not as an employee. Cue the outrage from the Murdoch Media who have campaigned against the ABC since Rupert stole his first piece of candy, demanding for her to be sacked, hanged, drawn and quartered.
And, unlike Louise Adler’s strong defence of writers, the craven ABC has caved to Murdoch’s Minions. Tingle has been “counselled” by ABC management, making me wonder how a manager can counsel a Board Member. But that’s modern corporatism, I guess.
They’re more than just performances of the sort where people dress up and do things in the hope of receiving money or acclaim, like the numerous clowns who do their stuff in front of the National Gallery. They’re bullying. Bullying is almost certainly the whole point, with fossil fuels and Gaza just a pretext. Bullies enjoy bullying. They enjoy seeing their victims humiliate themselves under pressure. They feel empowered when people abase themselves, and are encouraged to make further demands. And if they can convince themselves and others that their bullying is morally justified they’ve really hit the jackpot.
Perhaps Baillie Gifford could sponsor a festival on the understanding that they are who they are, and writers can make a decision whether or not to participate on that basis. If the price is festivals where Dawn Butler, Shami Chakrabarti, Charlotte Church and Nish Kumar refuse to appear, it’s one I am prepared to pay.
The activists have succeeded in forcing the Edinburgh Book Festival to drop sponsorship from Baillie Gifford because of their threatened disruption. The activists are such little shits – book festivals are about the safest place around to let off smoke bombs or whatever crap they do. This will damage the book festival, and of course the writers involved. According to Jenny Lindsay, the poet who was hounded out of Edinburgh by transactivists, one of her worst tormentors is part of this anti-book crusade.
There is an open letter from about every well-known Scottish writer, excluding Irvine Welsh, Ian Rankin and J K Rowling (who is English rather than Scottish but has lived here for decades) lamenting the loss of sponsorship.
“We are writers who are profoundly concerned about the fate of the UK’s book festivals and other cultural events, and the likely consequences of calls for boycotts related to festival sponsorship by Baillie Gifford. In particular we are deeply concerned about the future of the Edinburgh International Book Festival (EIBF).
As citizens, we are absolutely right to keep up the pressure for fossil fuel divestment. We also call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, and for the release of hostages.
However, a strategy of protest which results in EIBF being left without a principal sponsor will jeopardise its future: this would be a Pyrrhic victory, and merely deprive writers and activists of platform and influence.
As public discourse deteriorates and divisions widen, we believe that books and book festivals offer an increasingly rare opportunity for the community of writers and readers to come together in the free and civil exchange of ideas. Many of our number are actively involved in climate action, environmental and social justice issues. Book festivals allow writers subject to discrimination or harassment in their home countries to have their work and their cases heard (we think of the PEN Imprisoned Writers readings, a daily feature of EIBF).
Invitations to UK book festivals are a way for writers from places of conflict, including Palestine and Ukraine, to travel and share their stories.
For this vital cultural work we require a cultural infrastructure. We believe that boycotts which threaten such platforms, and which pressure other writers to comply, are deeply retrograde. Protest is of course our right and duty, but protest actions that risk the collapse of book festivals are ill-thought-out. For whom, exactly, would this be a victory?
To have any effect on investment practices we must exert the kind of influence only friends have over each other. We believe that story-telling, witness, theatre, poetry, conversation, reading and argumentation are crucial to this process, and that it would be perverse to destroy the means of our own political leverage and influence.
Our work depends on the robustness and integrity of the platforms that allow us to broadcast and promote our words, and to engage and meet our readers. Without the support of EIBF and other book festivals, and without the spaces provided by theatres and other cultural venues, our voices will merely grow quieter, and our young and emerging writers may never be heard at all.
Here in Scotland we recall that the Edinburgh Festivals – now a global phenomenon – were established as gestures of peace-making after WW2. The EIBF is a more recent addition, and we are proud of its success and the mutual support it has established with Scottish authors and authors worldwide. If the EIBF loses its long-term sponsor the reach of these authors will be palpably reduced. We call on writers and book workers to engage in dialogue to find ethically acceptable solutions whereby our festivals are not silenced.”
Alan Riach; Alexander McCall Smith; Ali Millar; Alistair Moffat; Andrew Greig; Andrew Neilson; Andrew O’Hagan; Bernard McLaverty; Catherine Czerkawska; Chris Brookmyre; Claudia Daventry; Colin Grant; Dan Richards; David Farrier; David Greig; Denise Mina; Don Paterson; Doug Johnstone; Elaine Morrison; Esa Aldegheri; Ever Dundas; Fiona Rintoul; Gavin Francis; Gerda Stevenson; Gerry Cambridge; Hannah McGill; Prof. Ian Brown; Ian MacPherson; Jackie Kay; James Robertson; Jen Stout; Jenny Colgan; Jenny Lindsay; Jim Crumley; John Glenday; Karine Polwart; Kathleen Jamie; Lesley Harrison; Linda Cracknell; Lisa Brockwell; Liz Lochead; Magi Gibson; Marisa Haetzman; Marjorie Lotfi; Mark Billingham; Merryn Glover; Michael Longley; Neal Ascherson; Niall Campbell; Peter Dorward; Peter Ross; Polly Clark; Raja Shehadeh; Richard Holloway; Ricky Ross; Robert Crawford; Robert Dawson Scott; Rodge Glass; Ron Butlin; Sam Baker; Sara Sheridan; Sarah Moss; Sean O’Brien; Stewart Conn; Stuart Kelly; Sue Lawrence; Tom Pow; Val McDermid; Zinnie Harris;
Scottish writers criticise ‘perverse’ protest over Edinburgh book festival as Baillie Gifford sponsorship ends (scotsman.com)
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