It's time we celebrated our City of Literature

Published on Sunday 19 March 2006 00:24

THE city of Berlin has risen from the ashes of its elegantly decadent past to become the capital city of Deutschland again. There's a hard-edged brutalism in its new and rebuilt architecture, design and style; it's a city of the young - vibrant and raw. And, at minus 12 degrees, it certainly was raw in mid-January.

Berlin was celebrating its designation as a Unesco City of Design, the sixth in the Creative Cities network, following the naming of Buenos Aires last year. I was there as a guest of Unesco and Berlin, to celebrate their award, and to share with a subsequent international seminar Edinburgh's experience as the pioneer Creative City in this global network, the first City of Literature in the world.

The mayor of Berlin received the accolade, with ambassadors, senators, and the design community en masse. The town hall was in full splendour and the German media were out in force. The presentation was sparky and realistic. And the press loved it all, funky fashion designers and seriously intellectual architects alike.

At the seminar they were desperate for information from Edinburgh. Everyone must be totally thrilled, they thought. Well, no. Our press has been caustic at times. Occasionally scathing, sometimes very critical.

What's not to like? wondered a German lawyer who had given up every free evening for months to push Berlin towards the Unesco award. Don't they want to be recognised round the world as a pre-eminent literary city?

But perhaps it comes from the enthusiasm of fertile imaginations who want this project to fulfil all those pent-up literary dreams, right now - a plethora of varied ambition. So let's stop and look how far we've come. The designation was pursued as a wake-up call, to highlight the talents of Scotland's writers past and present and, ultimately, to seek an increase in literature support at home. There was actually no literature designation at Unesco at the time, but the Creative Cities folk at Unesco in Paris loved the idea and so, with our input, they added it to their list. Edinburgh, astonishingly, became the first Creative City in the world. We've had press attention from Beijing to Vancouver - excellent for Scotland's literary reputation.

The first full year of this permanent accolade has been interesting; the scheme officially began in January 2005, and a major result was the first-ever Man Booker International Prize for literature held in Edinburgh, instead of Washington. New literary tours and literary guidebooks have appeared; writers-in-residence are at work or planned for a whole raft of unusual venues; Edinburgh is to be a City of Refuge for persecuted writers from abroad; Edinburgh University's James Tait Black Prize now awards serious money, and, yes, the support funds put into literature in general have increased hugely and are set for further growth when the new culture funding increase comes into play next year.

It was always about providing a good framework for literary work to flourish in, not about putting on a high-profile, short-term events programme, to which previous cultural badges have made us accustomed .

There are great ideas in development and a major city-wide reading campaign planned for autumn. Editors around the world are signing up books from Scottish writers, and the Scottish Arts Council's translation support is besieged. In Tartan Week in Washington a City of Literature frolic through Edinburgh's words, music and song is already a sell-out. The Japanese Literature Centre wants to study our work.

Yet the resources for running this network are amazingly small. There is small core funding to keep a lean administration and kick-start projects. It brings prestige to Scotland on a shoestring, and a great deal is done by people for whom it's a crusade, not a job. I've talked to the people from Buenos Aires and Shanghai and Durban who are all deeply impressed with what's been achieved in our capital city. Funding to maximise the potential of this work would be wonderful. So, perhaps we can all roll up our sleeves together and make it the best we can.

Lorraine Fannin is director of the Scottish Publishers Association and a founding trustee of Edinburgh Unesco City of Literature