Edinburgh Book Festival: Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, Richard Holloway, Leila Aboulela, Linda Grant & Robin Robertson

“It was all going fine until the shark came along.”

Former Bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway. Picture: Julie Bull

Edinburgh International Book Festival: Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, Richard Holloway, Leila Aboulela, Linda Grant & Robin Robertson

Not, perhaps, a sentence one would expect to hear at the Book Festival, but clearly the beginning of a good story. Sir Robin Knox-Johnston still recalls vividly the moment, during his solo circumnavigation of the globe in 1969, when he was diving to repair his boat in the Pacific and discovered he had company. I won’t spoil the story (which is in his autobiography, Running Free), but it didn’t end well for the shark.

Knox-Johnston, who is now 80, has lived a life packed with stories. Not only did he become the first person to sail solo non-stop around the world without the benefits of satellite technology and (although he did not know it at the time) while suffering from a ruptured appendix, but he repeated his voyage 12 years ago, becoming the oldest person to do so. He still sails competitively and shows no signs of retiring.

Stories of a different kind were the focus for the next event in the Main Theatre, with another octogenarian, former Bishop of Edinburgh Richard Holloway. We use stories to explain the world to ourselves, he said, in a riveting lecture which demonstrated that he has lost none of his oratory powers. However, he said that advancing years have made him want to “reconcile the contradictory stories I live by”.

He thought he had left the Christian narrative behind 20 years ago when he stood down from his ecclesiastical role. Instead, he has found himself drifting back towards the church – “a community that worships the God I don’t believe in” – and to the radical message of Jesus.

He took us on this journey, referencing Joan Didion, Dostoyevksy, Heidegger and WH Auden, among others, demonstrating powerfully how book festivals might have replaced religious institutions in some contexts as forums for the discussion of big ideas.

Holloway describes his return to the church as “coming home”, and the day began with a fascinating panel discussion on the nature of home, part of Val McDermid’s “Home/Less” strand of programming.

She had three ideal guests with whom to address the subject: Leila Aboulela, a Sudanese writer based in the UK, prize-winning novelist Linda Grant, whose Jewish ancestry is both Polish and Russian, and Robin Robertson, whose Booker-shortlisted narrative poem The Long Look tells the story of a demobbed soldier in the 1940s who finds a home of sorts with the homeless on LA’s Skid Row.

Their perspectives were radically different. Aboulela, who had been a statistician until she arrived in the UK, found in writing a place to explore the home she was missing. Robertson, a son of the manse, couldn’t wait to leave, and now realises he spent many years without a true home. Grant, meanwhile, is keenly aware of her family’s wandering heritage, and says her tenure in the UK still feels provisional.

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