Bookworm: Book Week Scotland and the future of book festivals debated | Raising the Dredd

The first Book Week Scotland ends today, with assurances from Creative Scotland that it will become a regular fixture. I wonder if Creative Scotland can make such bold promises about its own future.

Glasgow’s Mitchell Library is hosting a mini-festival today, with authors and illustrators of children’s books, including Mairi Hedderwick, John Fardell, Vivien French and Frank Cottrell Boyce on his sequel to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang; the National Makar Liz Lochhead on her favourite place (to tie in with this year’s theme); a cabaret of new and upcoming writers hosted by Ryan van Winkle; Scotland’s two best-known sci-fi writers Iain M Banks and Ken MacLeod in conversation; and a “Battle for the Book”.

This event, with Cabinet Secretary for Culture Fiona Hyslop, novelist, commentator and e-sceptic Ewan Morrison, Waterstone’s MD James Daunt, the Mitchell’s Karen Cunningham and Sara Hunt of Saraband Books, might care to address the future of book festivals, as the traditional printed book wanes. Even more intriguing might be Ms Hyslop on Amazon’s Byzantine corporation tax arrangements.

RAISING THE DREDD

World Book Night 2013 may seem fairly far away, but the 20 titles that will be given away in a kind of bookish Walpurgisnacht have already been chosen. It’s an unusual mixture of the literary (Bernard Schlink, Jeanette Winterson), the genre (the chillingly good Sophie Hannah, Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale), the populist (Andy McNab), and the clearly erudite (EH Gombrich’s History Of The World). Scotland fares better than usual, with both Sandy McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency and Stevenson’s Treasure Island, as well as Jackie Kay’s heartbreaking memoir Yellow Dust Road. Less well known Scottish writers feature as well, through the inclusion of a book few of the literati may know: Alan Grant and John Wagner’s Dark Judges story for 2000 AD’s Judge Dredd. It first appeared in 1981, and it’s strange to see how unremitting the violence was back then: that I read it at the age on nine seems unfeasible. Of course, much of Grant and Wagner’s dystopic satire seems almost coy now. Judge Dredd’s world featured illegal sugar, competitive eating, game shows about ugliness, shoot-to-kill policies and a surveillance society. Nothing at all like Britain in 2013 then.