Twenty years ago, literature festivals were a niche cultural activity, which essentially focused on meeting your favourite author and getting them to sign your book. They often took place in genteel towns and bucolic settings, away from the bustle and commerce of cities. Debates around freedom of expression, geopolitics and literature from “elsewhere” were similarly marginalised, argued over by special interest groups and constituencies.
Fast forward to the present, and the rolling news coverage and instant opinion-forming of social media often gives the illusion that connectivity equals knowledge.
Digital media seems to dovetail perfectly with contemporary urban life, equipping us with the memes and soundbites for a pub conversation or water-cooler moment. But while online platforms stimulate debate, they also – counterintuitively perhaps – increase the desire to argue and question and discover in person. In the age of social media, literary and book festivals have thrived and diversified, not only becoming more political and international in scope, but in some cases becoming international franchises themselves.
I’ve been privileged to visit festivals in different parts of the world, from PEN World Voices in New York to the famed Jaipur Literature Festival in India, and frequently it is the writers and events that explore these political faultlines, that reinterpret history and that open up face-to-face debates, which cut the deepest. At the heart of a busy city like Dublin, or London, or Dhaka, a literary festival clears a physical space to listen and think and then respond.
Physical books in themselves don’t have to be the trigger for debates around political or social debate, of course. And there is something about the research and writing of books that seems a very slow form of news dispatch. By the time the physical book is researched, written, edited, rewritten, proofed and printed, won’t the news agenda have moved on? Without a comment thread or a hashtag to latch on to, how does the time spent reading and debating books have purchase on the present?
The answer might be that just as geopolitical faultlines, such as that exposed by the crisis in Ukraine, emerge, their historical roots run deep, and their ramifications last for generations.
Perhaps where books triumph over the blog post or tweet is in their more panoramic viewpoint and deeper research, and greater investment on behalf of the writer and reader? Put simply, the time and intellectual industry devoted to crafting a book seems to elevate the value of its argument.
Literary festivals offer – I hope – a welcoming, non-partisan space for discussion, an environment where the mind is actively slowing down in order to learn and process. Switching off your mobile phone for the duration of the event often feels like a blessing; you can always join the online debate on the bus or the Dart journey home. That is, of course, if you’re not already tucking into the book that you picked up after the event.
Over this closing weekend of the International Literature Festival Dublin, writers delve into history to offer coruscating views of the present. Iranian author Azar Nafisi celebrates classic American writing as a means of freeing our imagination in the 21st century, Sofi Oksanen explores the complex history of Estonia through her fiction, and Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev debate the present and future of Russia and Ukraine.
Each of these authors – whether in fiction, criticism or reportage – demonstrates that, to paraphrase the great Czech dissident writer Milan Kundera, “we slow down to remember, and speed up to forget”.
Martin Colthorpe is programme director of International Literature Festival Dublin, which runs until Sunday
