Bookwork

KEYS TO A PASSIONAT Aye Write! book festival in Glasgow this week – just as, Bookworm is reliably informed, at the Bath Literary Festival last weekend – Janice Galloway was in spellbinding form, reading from her Collected Stories with panache.

Her love of performance, it turns out, has deep roots. While other writers and readers interviewed in The Book That Changed My Life (published last week by Luath, price 6.99) pick out more literary choices, Galloway plumps for one her mother bought for her, John W Schaum's Piano Course Book A (The Red Book). Mr Schaum's introductory greeting "Good luck and years of happy playing!" moved the 11-year-old Galloway to tears.

She was taught by a Mrs Hughes, who lived in a sheltered flat with paper-thin walls. Together they would work through the eight-bar tunes, each of which had drawings that could be coloured in when they had been mastered. Those tunes were not special, but they led on to a lifelong love of music: "My first piano primer gave me a language of only seven letters, yet containing every sound imaginable."

A TOUR ON THE SIDE

BEING in charge not just of Britain's biggest library authority but Scotland's second-biggest book festival is a demanding enough job, but Aye Write! director Karen Cunningham also acts as an unpaid Glasgow tour guide. Or she did last week, when showing the distinguished South African jurist and civil rights activist Albie Sachs, one of the stars of the festival's opening night, around the city.

Picking up Mr Sachs at his hotel on Saturday, she took him on an unofficial tour of the Glasgow School of Art, which came to an end when they were ordered out of the building – only to find a parking ticket slapped on her Honda Civic. After that, they went to Nelson Mandela Place and the Gorbals, where one of Mr Sachs's friends once worked as a social worker. The tour ended in a dash to Central Station that left the Highway Code some way behind.

RUNNING LIKE CLOCKWORK

FOR all the fraught business of running a book festival, there are moments when everything is running with dream-like smoothness. For Cunningham, Thursday evening was such a time. Drifting round the Mitchell Library, she could take in Alison Kennedy reading from her next novel, Tom Leonard reading new poems, Michael Mansfield expounding on miscarriages of justice, a fascinating panel on memoir writing with Janice Galloway, William Fiennes and Rupert Thompson, and Sandi Toksvig in superlative form.

Talking of Toksvig, Bookworm is tempted to tell the story of the time she and Cunningham shared a bed at the Hay Festival. But as news is just in of Edinburgh-based Canongate author Dan Rhodes winning the $20,000 EM Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his novel Little Hands Clapping, it will have to wait for another occasion.