Edinburgh Book Festival Review

Jackie Kay

Linda Grant

Bernard MacLaverty

LISTENING to Jackie Kay talk and read her poetry is the closest thing art can offer to a hug from your big sister.

The makar in poetry and in person is a repository of decency, humanity and humour. In her session at the book festival yesterday she joked about periods, zimmer envy and her love for her ageing adoptive parents. Having met her birth parents, she said, she was even more delighted to have been adopted. "I mean PHEW! In capital letters and exclamation marks."

Love and war were the themes of the session with a new poem – or rather five poems in one – premiered to celebrate the centenary of the meeting of war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen at Craiglockhart in Edinburgh in 1917.

Kay's poem(s) embraced the horror or war, both poet's sexuality and the comradeship they developed in the very city in which we were sitting.

"I think friendship can be a big love affair too," Kay suggested

What is left of us is love, as another poet once noted. And in our current "surreal and psychotic age", the age, Kay reminded us dolefully, of Trump, love and art are some consolation. And travelling around as makar she has discovered a Scotland that is really changing, Talking to her driver on Uist, Kay recalls telling her that she had been thrilled to see so many lesbians in the audience.

"Aye, we manage to hang on to our lesbians," her driver noted. "But we lose our gay men."

Change was one of the themes of novelist Linda Grant's session earlier in the day. Grant, born in 1951, was herself part of the 1960s youthquake (she hung out in the Cavern). "I thought my generation was born young and strong forever," she admitted. "Having grey hair and wrinkles was a lifestyle choice."

But she has come to realise that it was her parents' generation who were responsible for the liberalising changes of the 1960s (the baby boomers weren't old enough). That's the same generation who had come through the war and decided to build a new world through a national health service and slum clearance.

Her new novel The Dark Circle is set in a TB sanatorium and the last part of the hour saw the audience sharing their stories of the disease (it hasn't gone away, you know). But then neither have other afflictions. The anti-semitism that was alive in Britain after the war, Grant suggested, is still alive now.

"The language that was being used about Jewish refugees after the war is being used today," she reminded us. "It's the language replicated by Nigel Farage."

Not everything has changed then. And not all politicians are in writers' bad books. Bernard MacLaverty was thrilled, he revealed talking to Jenny Brown, that Nicola Sturgeon has revealed herself to be something of a fan on Twitter. "That's grand," the genial Northern Irish novelist confirmed. "And she's not even Irish."

It has been 16 years since MacLaverty's last novel, time he has spent working on opera libretti, being a classical music DJ and a grandfather to eight grandchildren. But as his readings reminded us, MacLaverty the novelist has been missed. Whatever you might think of Nicola Sturgeon, she is 100% right on this.