Book Festival

IT takes a special kind of novelist to make people shake with laughter simply by reading out a Christmas supermarket shopping spree done by one of her characters.

ANNE ENRIGHT managed it on Saturday as, in her lilting Dublin accent, she read from her brilliant, Man Booker-longlisted novel, The Green Road. How did she do that with words?, asked an admiring Viv Groskop, who was chairing. It’s all about cadence and rhythm, explained Enright. Cadence and rhythm.

Over the next 35 minutes she was open, engaging and funny. She spoke about being the youngest of five children, about becoming a writer, about working in the competitive if ultimately “silly” world of TV for six years - “you’re in this very high-pressured environment, being very ambitious - but if you’re really, really good you might get to direct a quiz show..."

It helped her to realise where her ambitions really lay. Holding her first published book in her hand made her feel that “this was the more authentic self, one way or another, or just a better way to manage my ambition.”

She remembered her shock at reading a “canonical anthology” of Irish literature in 1991 and realising that not one female writer had been included in it. “They just ———- forgot”, she said, to laughter. The situation didn’t change much over the next 20 years, she added.

A week after hosting the Rev Jesse Jackson, Ruth Wishart returned to the main tent alongside ALISTAIR MOFFAT, the prolific author, whose latest book, Scotland: A History from Earliest Times, attracted lots of interest in the bookshop afterwards on the back of his talk.

Moffat spoke entertainingly of many things: how Scotland’s unique land was his way into this new book; why he devoted more than just a few pages to Scotland’s prehistory, to understand how the land formed the character of the people.

He touched on the ferocity and brutality of ancient times - not simply the burning of witches, but also the fact that a rival to Alexander III was castrated so that he could not produce any sons or be a threat. Moffat also touched on his admiration of Keir Hardie, and took a passing swipe at the White Heather Club and Highland kitsch.

The Glasgow-born author JOHANN HARI, in conversation with Kevin Williamson, spoke revealingly about the war on drugs, the subject of his book, Chasing the Scream. He began by relating the official cruelty meted out to the singer Billie Holiday because she was an addict. “Even when she was dying of cirrhosis of the liver, they arrested her on her death-bed,” said Hari. “They handcuffed her to her death-bed.”

The more you listened to Hari, the more you became convinced that our current official drugs policy. He cited the success of Portugal’s far-sighted decriminalisation of drug possession and its decision to spend money on helping addicts turn their lives around.

Fifteen years on, injecting drug use is down by 50 per cent: overdose deaths, HIV transmission and street crime are all down. Williamson, for his part, damned the “culture of silence” surrounding Scotland’s drug deaths.

The ‘Trading Stories’ strand has led to all sorts of absorbing discussions. Yesterday, the penultimate day of the 2015 festival, ELIF SHAFAK, a key voice in contemporary Turkish fiction, and the Bosnian-American writer ALEKSANDAR HEMON discussed what it was like to write in English - a language that was in neither case their cradle tongue. It sparked all sorts of intriguing disclosures.

Hemon, whose latest novel is The Making of Zombie Wars, spoke of settling in America in 1992, where he had arrived as a young journalist. The Bosnian war broke out, and he stayed in Chicago.

In time he realised he was cut off from his native language, “in as much as the language is defined by the experience of people who speak it. My experience was entirely different from people under siege, or who were being subject to genocide.”

He declined to become a correspondent for his old magazine back home: “I kept thinking: what can I tell them? How do you talk about, say, a new movie in American cinemas to people who are under siege?”

Shafak, whose latest novel is The Architect’s Apprentice, was equally compelling. She spoke of tweeting in both Turkish and English on certain issues. She could tweet in Turkish about, say, domestic violence there. It might be acceptable - but Turks became outraged if she tweeted the same observation in English. ‘Why are you telling them this?’ they would demand to know.

Art historian PATRICIA R ANDREW said the blurb in her latest work, A Chasm in Time: Scottish War Art and Artists in the Twentieth Century, cited well-known artists such as Charles Rennie Mackintosh.”That’s to get you in, I think,” she said, to smiles. But she was at pains in her book to highlight artists whose names might not be so familiar today.

A screen behind her flashed up a selection of their work, the subjects ranging from the Singer factory making 15-inch shells, to a First World War camel patrol setting out at dawn, and the first snows at Lammermuir glimpsed from an 1918 airship. The book covers later conflicts, too, including the Falklands and Afghanistan. This was a compelling talk.