My Festival: Louise Welsh

Electra is such a strong role for women – and the idea of obsession and revenge is interesting to me as a writer. Obsession is what fuels a lot of the stories in my books.

Visual Art

I’m very interested in the way that visual art and text influence each other or collide, so I’m looking forward to seeing the Dieter Roth exhibition at the Fruitmarket. Another show I’m very keen to see for the same reason is Ian Hamilton Finlay at the Ingleby Gallery. I was at Little Sparta earlier this year, and I’m very interested to see his audio visual installations as well as his sculpture. I’m starting to make sound work at the moment – I’ve made some sound pieces with an architect called Jude Barber, which we’ve installed in various sites around Glasgow’s Merchant City; they’re concerned with exploring the city’s relationship with the slave trade. That kind of collaboration, the blending of boundaries between text, sound and art, is interesting to me at the moment so both of those exhibitions have strong appeal.

Comedy

Everything can’t be serious all the time so I’m really hoping I can see Amy Lamé’s Unhappy Birthday at Assembly George Square. Every night there’s a special seat kept for Morrissey so I’m hoping the night I turn up he’ll be there. Amy is a very innovative performer, she’s playful but also extremely political, but because it’s so much fun and so inventive you sometimes forget the hard politics she’s putting across.

Opera

I have a vested interest in this, but my partner Zoe Strachan has written the libretto for The Lady From The Sea (King’s Theatre, 29 August and 1 September), for which Craig Armstrong has written the music. And of course I’ve also done a libretto for Ghost Patrol (King’s Theatre, 10 August and 1-2 September). So the whole family will be going – actually the whole family won’t be going because we can’t get tickets! But they’ll be coming to the Glasgow shows. We’ve been to see every production the Scottish Opera has done over the past few years, and it’s hugely exciting to get to work in these different media. It’s been a big part of enriching my cultural life and opening up another door in my head.

Books

I’m a big fan of Ron Butlin and I think his new book The Magicians Of Edinburgh looks great. I read a poem from it called The Trams and thought, everyone in Edinburgh will enjoy this – it’s the only thing about trams that will make people smile. I’d like to see him at the Book Festival (18 and 24 August). Ron is a very serious poet and artist but he’s got a great deal of playfulness in him. He’s been invited to write poems for specific events and places and I’d like to see if he talks about that. We imagine that artists having a lightbulb moment but sometimes these invitations can lead to something unexpected. They can lead an artist to a whole new strand of work and Ron is a really good example of that.

• Louise Welsh is at Edinburgh International Book Festival tonight at 7pm, talking about her new book The Girl On The Stairs.  www.edbookfest.co.uk