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This year’s Edinburgh book festival is expanding its slate of genre-busting musical events, including staging Japanese Noh theatre at one of the city’s oldest religious sites, Greyfriars Kirk.
Jenny Niven, the Edinburgh international book festival’s director, said such events broke away from the traditional formula of authors sitting in tents, and aimed to attract new audiences and celebrate literature’s interplay with other art forms.
“Books don’t have to be medicine,” she said.
This year’s programme includes a series of performances featuring, among others, Ali Smith, Kathleen Jamie and William Dalrymple at Greyfriars, which was built in the early 1600s on grounds previously occupied by a 15th-century Franciscan monastery.
As part of the festival’s Scotland to the World strand, Jamie’s wildlife essay On Rona, about the remote, uninhabited Hebridean island North Rona, will be enacted by the minimalist Noh Reimagined theatre company and the Scottish musicians Brìghde Chaimbeul, who plays Scottish smallpipes, and Aidan O’Rourke on fiddle.
A Dutch contemporary classical group, New European Ensemble (NEuE), will play four pieces written for Smith’s work, while she reads from it. In The Golden Road, Dalrymple’s histories of Scottish colonialism in India will accompany the “fusion sounds” of India Alba.
Niven said this approach reflected the fact that fiction and literature were routinely consumed in different ways, including film adaptations, musical interpretations and plays. This year’s festival will also offer live cookery events with food writers, a strand pioneered in 2024.
“It’s a huge programme and there’s absolutely space to play with different art forms,” she said. The impetus also came from efforts to combat declining literacy and reading rates and competition from social media.
Niven has commissioned mixed-genre shows in previous book festival roles, including the poet Benjamin Zephaniah in a hip-hop production in Beijing, China, and putting Michael Palin in a bird house at Australia’s Melbourne zoo.
This year’s event will feature a blockbuster appearance by the thriller writer John Grisham, the author of the Pelican Brief and The Firm who has reputedly sold 500m books, with Ian Rankin at the 1,000-seater McEwan Hall.
Niven said this year’s festival nonetheless had a deliberately serious tone, with “Changing your mind” as its central theme.
“In a world where people are very certain of their positions about all sorts of issues, all kinds of polarised, in all kinds of ways, how do we stay flexible in our thinking? How do we open our minds to new ideas, new ways of thinking?” Niven said at the programme launch.
Afterwards she said the festival was not “deliberately pitting polarised views against each other for spectacle or for a headline”. The aim was to programme authors and speakers with different views that audiences would seek out to challenge themselves.
The UK supreme court ruling on the legal definition of sex, which has led to contested official advice about single-sex toilets from the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, would be debated in an event chaired by Brenda Hale, the former supreme court president.
Her guests will be legal experts on either side of the gender debate: Karon Monaghan KC, who represents gender critical groups, and Keio Yoshida, a barrister who champions trans rights.
The festival will also present the big-tech critic and author of Enshittification, Cory Doctorow, in conversation with the Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales; while Steve Crossan, who worked on Google’s DeepMind AI project, will debate with Alan Finkel, the Australian government’s former chief scientist and the creator of the AI-free certification service ProudlyHuman.
Niven said she was excited about competing projects from the Edinburgh fringe festival and Festivals Edinburgh, the sector’s umbrella group, to investigate new digital and data-mining technologies which could lead to a unified festivals box office or app.
She stressed she wanted to protect the book festival’s specific identity, and said she was agnostic about what kind of technology could be introduced. It could mean more tailored ticketing systems for overseas audiences.
“I’m open and I’m genuinely quite excited about the potential for these new tools to make more of what we have,” she said.
