'The festival is special because it's been adopted by the town'

He'd been to this part of the world before. He'd first came on holiday with his then partner, made friends and kept returning. He'd even attended his first Wigtown Book Festival in 2004. He loved the charm of it. And it got him thinking of moving to the area. "It obviously had enough magic to draw me here," he says smiling over pub lunch in the town.

He has now spent rather more than a year in Dumfries and Galloway (or D&G as he often calls it). For the last six of those years he has also been director of the festival he first visited almost 10 years ago.

Today, a wet Wednesday in Wigtown, this year's festival is still a couple of weeks away and there is an air of calm around the festival office, although Turpin's assessment of the current situation is one of "creative chaos".

Perhaps that's to be expected. Turpin himself has just become a father again. His second child has been born in London just five weeks before this year's Wigtown beano kicks off.

The festival itself has also been hit by a minor Twitter kerfuffle earlier this month when it criticised a poem on Twitter and was criticised in turn for the criticism ("We probably shouldn't have done it," he admits).

And, as he says, with an event that is so reliant on a large number of volunteers: "You have to trust that everyone's in place and doing their job."

That's also the fun of it, though, he says. "There's a huge community buy-in to the festival. We have over 100 volunteers who work at the festival and that's in a town of 900. Over the years the festival has been genuinely adopted by the people of the town and I think that's what makes it very special."

Turpin now spends much of his time in London, but he seems very much at home in this remote part of the world. The nearest city is Belfast, after all. But on the upside that means the area is fiercely independent. There is a real can-do attitude to be found.

"It's farming country. It's got a lot of ingenious people, which means if you have an idea like 'let's do an outdoors movie, let's do something in a ruined bothy in the middle of a forest' you can get that done because people have always been strapping things together out of bits and wood and farm machinery."

All of this comes together in Wigtown in October when writers give talks, lead walks and generally muck in. Last year Janice Galloway even held a knitting class. It's an off-the-wall approach to book festivals, you might say, although Turpin slightly winces when I suggest as much.

"I think off-the-wall makes it sound gimmicky. I think one of the greatest resources we have is the landscape and the history and the sense of place this whole area has and you'd be stupid not to use it.

"Two-thirds of our audience come from outside D&G. What are you going to do? Lock them in a room to listen to talks? In some cases what the festival does is showcase the area."

That's what makes it different to an event like the Edinburgh book festival, he says. "If you look at Edinburgh they're in the middle of a circus. There's no point them joining the circus."

His job in Wigtown then, he reckons, is to be a bit of a ringmaster. Sounds like fun. He says it is, but most of his job is about funding - about coming up with business plans and seeking corporate and public funding. "And of course occasionally there's the odd book to read."

Turpin doesn't come from a particularly "booky" background. Comic books and Enid Blyton were the stuff he grew up on.

He was born in Essex, "estuary Essex", the son of a mum who was a secretary at Ford Motors, "which is about as Essexy, Dagenhamy a job as you can get" and a photographer father who doesn't seem to have been around much.

Educated at private school in London (on a scholarship). He joined the Independent newspaper in 1992 straight out of university on the arts desk. "It was an extraordinary place in terms of large-brained people."

He worked alongside journalists such as Andrew Graham Dixon, Tom Sutcliffe and Adam Mars Jones (all of whom have forged careers in broadcasting and novel-writing in the years since) and loved the magic of creating a paper from nothing.

Festivals do that too, he suggests. "It's the Brigadoon effect. Suddenly the circus comes to town and it's transformed. Everyone needs fantasy periods in their life ... where life feels a bit different, a bit heightened. It feels like there are possibilities beyond the everyday."

Such moments don't just happen in book festivals or newspapers of course. He met his current partner in 2010. She lived in London.

When they became a couple and she became pregnant it became clear he was going to have to start spending much more time in London. "I did actually at that point offer to resign if the board felt that was the right thing to do. They didn't want to take it so it wasn't an issue."

He admits the last couple of years have been hard. His daughter is now in nursery and there's a new baby too. He spends a third of the year in Wigtown, two-thirds in London, which is at least handy for meeting publishers. "But during the festival we'll all be up."

In his time in charge the festival has doubled in size and budget. It is thriving. As are the arts in Dumfries and Galloway.

The book festival and recent events like an environmental arts festival in the area (one which saw the singer Imogen Heap turn up in the middle of the night to take part in sound artist Frenchbloke's 24-hour unheard music broadcast) are examples of how the arts can help in rural regeneration.

Here's a real example of how the arts and culture can be acts of transformation, in engendering a sense of place in the place itself and in the country at large. "The region is really interesting to see how that's genuinely being done.

"You can almost see it better because of where it's starting from. It's not like the Highlands and Islands in being internationally known."

Of course the day we speak Moray Council announces plans to shut libraries and it's not so long since the Culture Minister in London, Maria Miller, said the arts have to make the economic case.

The idea of art for art's sake has surely long gone. But Turpin regards Miller's comments as stupid (add your own expletive to give his remark proper emphasis. He did).

"It's about having functional economies," he says. "It's about people making a reasonable living and deciding to stay here. Economic impact isn't just about economic impact. It's about creating economic impact so the quality of life can carry on."

That's the spin-off, of course. In the short term Turpin's job is to help come up with a festival that pleases the audience and the writers who make the journey to this geographically remote corner of the UK.

"We had one writer who came here the other year, Rachel Hewitt, who wrote a history of the Ordnance Survey and after the event a guy came up to her and said 'I've got a home-made helicopter. Do you want to come and see this Trig point?' She goes and sees him the next day, they fly up to the Trig point at the top of a hill and there's a group of hippies smoking, playing music and drinking. She got back to London and sent me an email saying 'did that really happen'. She will never forget that experience."

Adrian Turpin thinks that's typical of Wigtown. After all, that's why he moved here in the first place.

For information and tickets on this year's Book Festival visit www.wigtownbookfestival.com.