list.co.uk/festival Previews | FESTIVAL BOOKS
MELVIN BURGESS & JEREMY DYSON Hauntings and hunger DAMIAN BARR Growing up gay in Conservative Scotland
SYLVIA PLATH Can we ever know the true Plath?
Melvin Burgess is best known for his award-winning young adult social realist fiction, and Jeremy Dyson is the non-performing writer from The League of Gentlemen, but they both come to the festival this year bringing freshly published horror books. ‘I’ve always loved horror,’ says Burgess, describing Hunger, written for the reborn Hammer imprint, as ‘a mix of good old hammy Hammer, a splash of Buffy and a hard slug of gruesome and scary. I loved the idea of a monster that metamorphoses like an insect, from ghoul to vampire to full-blown demon, feeding on humans as its prey.’ Dyson’s book is a little more complex, as he explains: ‘The Haunted Book began life as an investigation into my own literary first love − the anthology of true ghost stories. It’s my personal take on the form, fusing it with my love of books themselves. It also started with a question: what happens if a book turns out to be haunted by another, older book?’ The depths of horror should quickly accumulate at this event, as Dyson and Burgess dig out the connections between their own books, and the books that haunt them. (Paul Gallagher) ■ Charlotte Square Gardens, 0845 373 5888, 17 Aug, 8.30pm, £10 (£8).
Damian Barr always knew his memoir, Maggie and Me, with its more generous assessment of the late Margaret Thatcher (who he says inspired him to get out and make something of himself), would provoke anger, especially in Scotland. But it’s the tough childhood he had, bullied by his mother’s boyfriends for being gay and physically assaulted in his own home, that was the most daunting part of writing his book. ‘I’d come out of my shed in the garden where I was writing and literally be sick, it was like being traumatised all over again. But you have to go back there for your readers. So a lot of the time I had my eyes actually closed while typing.’ Honesty was the most important thing to keep in mind when writing the book, he says. ‘Your adult self is constantly intruding, making comments, and you have to leave all that out. As an abused child, I’ve done what [the abusers tell you] you’re not supposed to do, by talking about it. I do feel like an adult for the first time in writing this book, because I’m not that child any more.’ (Lesley McDowell) ■ Charlotte Square Gardens, 0845 373 5888, 17 Aug, 7pm, £10 (£8)
Doting mother or fiercely driven artist; who is the true Sylvia Plath? In the 50 years since she killed herself, the life of the American poet and novelist has become blurred. In Mad Girl’s Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life
Before Ted, Andrew Wilson aims ‘to show a Plath who was a real living, breathing woman who existed at a particular time in history; a writer and a woman in her own right’.
Researching what was ‘the largest chunk of Plath’s life’ − before she met Ted Hughes − Wilson ‘unearthed a mass of unpublished material (diaries, letters, photos) and talked to lots of friends and lovers who had never spoken publicly about Plath before’.
For all this delving, he uncovered a familiar 1950s tale of repression and self-loathing: ‘On the surface, she presented herself as a smiling, respectable all-American girl, but underneath she was a mass of anger and sexual frustrations. She also felt a great deal of anger about constrained gender roles and her economic situation.’ (Janette Currie) ■ Charlotte Square Gardens, 0845 373 5888, 16 Aug: Reading workshop on The Bell Jar, 1pm, £15 (£12); Andrew Wilson event , 5pm, £10 (£8).
JACKIE KAY & MATTHEW KAY Keeping it in the family
Jackie Kay has recently been working with asylum seekers in Glasgow, looking at their cultural contributions to Scottish political life. At her appearance at the Edinburgh International Book Festival this week, she’s set to discuss the political poetry that grew out of a meeting between herself and three refugees that was set up by the Scottish Refugee Council, an encounter that she describes as ‘a real eye-opener’. ‘The challenge for me is not to write straightforward polemical
poems,’ she says, ‘but to leave enough space for the reader to make up their mind. ‘Should the suffragettes have come back from the dead, they
would be, I think, truly shocked to return to a world like this,’ Kay continues, ‘where women flee for safety and find no safe haven. The hope, when you write poems like this, is that they will in their small way contribute to making something happen.’ It has evidently been a time of political inspiration for the whole
family. The EIBF event will also include a discussion of Kay’s work with her son, Matthew Kay, a filmmaker. How will that dynamic feel on stage?
‘It’ll be interesting being on with Matthew because we’ve never
done this before,’ she says. As well as the discussion, Matthew will be screening an extract from his film, Over the Wall, which looks at the journey of a group of young footballers to the Middle East during the Arab Spring.
‘I’m excited about seeing how everyone responds to Matthew’s documentary,’ says Kay senior, ‘I’ll have to try and stop myself looking too much like a proud mum on stage. That’ll be the most difficult bit for me. I went to a screening of Matthew’s film in London and his old film teacher said to me, “You must be very proud.” I said, “I’m so proud I could levitate!”’ (Charlotte Runcie) ■ Charlotte Square Gardens, 0845 373 5888, 16 Aug, 4.30pm, £10 (£8).
15–26 Aug 2013 THE LIST FESTIVAL 33