EDINBURGH INTERNATIONAL BOOK FESTIVAL

Joanne Harris

Miranda Sawyer

Tahar Ben Jelloun & Irenosen Okojie

Kirsty Gunn

NOT for JOANNE HARRIS the dusty life of an author permanently chained to a cobwebbed attic desk and ancient Amstrad. “The thing about writing,” she said yesterday, “is that only a small percentage of it acually happens at the desk. Writing is really a kind of filtration system of experience.”

Meeting other people, getting out and about, doing book festivals like Edinburgh’s, is so important for her as a creative writer. But, speaking yesterday, she repeated her dislike of those literary festivals that charge the public for entry but do not pay ordinary fiction writers to take part, preferring to pay large premiums to TV celebrities, actors and rock stars who have written books. She did, however, exempt festivals in Scotland and Ireland.

In an illuminating hour Harris discussed her latest novel, Different Class, and recalled her many years spent as a teacher. Asked by an audience member whether we might see Vianne Rocher, heroine of her novel, Chocolat, again, she said: “She won’t leave me alone. I’m sure she will have another outing, at least one.”

MIRANDA SAWYER spoke entertainingly about her time on Smash Hits magazine and, more pertinently, about her latest book, Out of Time, a personal look at a mid-life crisis that hit her when she was just 43, prompted by the birth of her second child. “It was a piddling little mid-life crisis,” she conceded. “It was very undramatic. I didn’t run off with a builder.”

There were anecdotes and cheerful quips throughout, and an interesting one about a lucrative book-deal she was offered but eventually turned down, about Madonna at 50. Fittingly, given the subject, there were lots of observant and poignant little moments, too, such as the “sad little missives” posted by men on NHS forums about the mid-life crisis, lamenting missed opportunities and changes in their physical appearance. No-one ever replied to their words, she said: they just faded away, ignored.

Saywer advised us to seek to change small things about ourselves, and also extolled the benefits of running very slowly. She herself listens to economic podcasts while running.

TAHAR BEN JELLOUN, one of France’s most feted authors, and Morocco’s greatest living author, spoke via an interpreter about his career and his latest novel, About My Mother, which tells the story of her descent into dementia. He touched on the 19 months he spent in a Moroccan military prison, having been arrested as a student protestor. He wasn’t allowed to read or to write, but would write in secret, even in the toilets. His writings were eventually published.

Sharing the spotlight with fellow author, Nigerian-born IRENOSEN OKOJIE, he also touched on terrorism, and said that jidahists had managed to change something that other organisation had managed to achieve: to change the survival instinct that all of us have into an instinct for death.

Yesterday began with an engrossing discussion between award-winning, New Zealand-born author KIRSTY GUNN and chair, Dan Gunn - “no relation,” as Dan made clear at the outset, though Kirsty did say that both their fathers’ families came “from the same kind of bit of Caithness and there is something about Dan that feels very, very familiar to me.”

They had spoken about the subtleties of Kirsty’s work, including her short- story collection, Infidelities, and her new contribution to the Cahiers series, which Dan edits, when the conversation turned to the pleasures of childhood reading and of the physical book itself. Perhaps, mused Dan, “children of the future will have a nostalgic pleasure about having an iPad in their hand as a child, because there will be some other machine that they’re linked up to by that point, or their brains will have been taken away from them, or something.”