Edinburgh Book Festival journeys throughout Scotland, from Old Town's streets to Shetland

Naomi Alderman at the Edinburgh Book Festival | Annabel Moeller

The Power was selected as one of the top reads of 2017 by both Barack Obama and Bill Gates. This was where interviewer Nicola Sturgeon began the conversation, though she resisted Alderman’s playful attempts to invite her to name the people she would most like to see zapped.

She did go as far as reflecting on the five Tory Prime Ministers with whom she worked, saying she respected Theresa May the most as she took the job most seriously, while Boris Johnson “turned everything into a joke” - even the pandemic.

She had clearly enjoyed Alderman’s more recent novel, The Future, set in the world of tech billionaires. Immensely knowledgeable and entertaining, Alderman said that the novel was inspired by the fact that we increasingly view the world through our screens, not always understanding that it is filtered by algorithms designed to capture as much of our time and money as possible.

Rather than accept this unchallenged, Alderman proposes a list of solutions, first among them that information companies need to be taken out of the hands of powerful individuals who can run them as they please. “All my books are a way of saying, ‘Come on, let’s have a think about something together. We made this world together, can’t we make it a bit better?”

Profound moral questions haunt at least one strand of this year’s Book Festival programme as a series of events commemorating the bicentenary of James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. The 1824 novel, experimental even by today’s standards, has influenced writers including Ian Rankin, James Robertson, Graeme Macrae Burnet and even the movie Fight Club.

Festival director Jenny Niven invited a range of creative practitioners to revisit Hogg, including Ben Harrison, artistic director of site-specific theatre company Grid Iron, who created Perambulations of a Justified Sinner, an immersive audio-visual journey round the streets and vennels of the Old Town (available as a download until 25 August). 

He worked with writer Louise Welsh, who scripted - and voices - the editor, just one of the onion layers of Hogg’s unreliable narrators. In a story of doubles and doppelgangers and - as Harrison pointed out - people walking around Edinburgh, Welsh’s narrative, in particular, makes links from the novel to the physical, social and political geography of the city.

The name of Amy Liptrot is much in the air this festival, with the premiere of both the stage adaptation and the film of her Orkney memoir, The Outrun. At the Book Festival, she joined two writers from Shetland - three if you count the chair, Christine De Luca - for a discussion focussing on the Northern Isles.

Poet Jen Hadfield, a resident of Shetland for 18 years, expresses her relationship with the islands in her memoir, Stormpegs. It’s a book, she says, about not knowing, about trying to get a grasp on a place which seems to shift and change as much as the weather does. If this reading is anything to go by, she has brought to prose all of the verbal acuity and inventiveness of her poetry.

The youngest of the group, Roseanne Watt, spoke with the soft rippling rhythms of Shetland. A native Shetlander who has now returned to the islands to live, she is a past winner of the Edwin Morgan Award for poets under 30, and her first collection Moder Dy (literally Mother Wave) is named for the wave which is said to travel always in the direction of islands, bringing Shetlanders home.