Bookworm: ‘the renaissance of storytelling is a contemporary phenomenon’

Homer Run

HOW often have you heard storytellers tackle the whole of The Odyssey? I don’t mean watching a dramatisation or a film, but being in an audience and listening to a storyteller – the way Homer’s epic was originally told. If you say you have, you’re lying. It hasn’t happened since Roman times. But a week today, at the Hub in Edinburgh, it will.

The idea came to Scottish Storytelling Festival director Donald Smith when thinking about the programme for the 23rd festival. Storytellers were coming from Ithaca, Malta, Cyprus, Corsica, and Sardinia – as well as from Scotland. All of their oral traditions, he noted, had folk tale variants of episodes of the Odyssey – so why not get them all together to perform the Odyssey itself?

Has this really never been done in modern times? Bookworm asked Smith, incredulously. “Not that I’ve been able to find out,” he said. “That might be because the renaissance of storytelling is a contemporary phenomenon.

“But we’re doing it in Homer’s way and in his method, and when you do, you see its extraordinary artistry and deep humanity.”

The five-hour performance (split into two events, at 3pm and 7pm) involves 15 storytellers and five musicians. “It’s a shortened version,” admitted Smith. “We’d be there for a week otherwise.”

Rabbit Home Run

FINALLY, in a week dominated by a certain raucous literary prize south of the Border, respect please to Sarah Winman, who won the (deep breath) Edinburgh International Book Festival’s Newton First Book Award on Wednesday. Her book When God War A Rabbit beat the other 46 debuts at this year’s festival without any of the plotting and black propaganda that Dame Stella Rimington claimed to see from critics of this year’s Man Booker prize. Good to see Julian Barnes finally win that too, even if his The Sense of an Ending falls short by comparison to his superlative Arthur and George, for which he was