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Greenwich Park with the Royal Naval College, Queens House and Canary Wharf in the distance.
Wider angle on books festivals ... Greenwich Park with the Royal Naval College, Queens House and Canary Wharf in the distance. Photograph: Neville Mountford-Hoare/Getty Images/Aurora Creative
Wider angle on books festivals ... Greenwich Park with the Royal Naval College, Queens House and Canary Wharf in the distance. Photograph: Neville Mountford-Hoare/Getty Images/Aurora Creative

Literary festivals are getting too big for their books

This article is more than 8 years old

Some authors flourish in front of the crowds at the biggest book festivals, but do readers get more from a smaller event?

What is the point of book festivals? To see your favourite authors on stage, hear them read from their books and in conversation? Or meet them, queue up to get their signatures in your first editions, and ask them questions? To discover new writers you had never heard of, try things out and broaden your mind? Or learn how to do something – such as how to make bubble writing bunting, as my children will be doing at the first-ever Greenwich book festival this weekend?

Festival-goers want different things, and festivals, while superficially very similar, have different priorities. All feature authors sitting on stages in tents or theatres, individually or in pairs, usually with a journalist or another writer to introduce them, have a conversation and mediate an exchange with the audience. But the focus and atmosphere of such events can vary hugely, and is not only an effect of the author’s level of fame or success.

It can be brilliant simply to see up close the authors whose work you admire or love – appearances from Don DeLillo and Toni Morrison from years ago are still fresh in my mind. Readings by poets, novelists, or comedians and actors who are also writers, can also be dramatic performances, as Charles Dickens’s famously were. I’ve also come come away from expensive, ticketed events infuriated by chairs who appeared more interested in their own opinions than in the audience, hadn’t done enough reading to make the discussion interesting, or turned the whole thing into a chummy double act (“as I said to John in the Green room …”)

This year’s Hay festival, which kicked off on Thursday night, calls itself “a party that is first and foremost a party”. Twenty-seven years old now and with stars including Jude Law appearing alongside many excellent writers, Hay sits at the showbiz end of the spectrum. On Saturday, I’m headed for a less glitzy event, though one in a stunning location: the first ever Greenwich books festival, supported by Greenwich University and Greenwich council and taking place in the Old Royal Naval College by the river.

I’m chairing an event with Selina Todd (1pm, Queen Anne Building, tickets £6), author of The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, and looking forward to hearing her historian’s perspective on this month’s general election. I’m also wondering – if, say, no one turns up, or fellow historian Tristram Hunt decides to come – whether we might end up as a joke in a comic novel, because this festival has its very own satirist, Paul Ewen.

Ewen is writer-in-residence at Greenwich University and working on a follow-up to his novel Francis Plug: How to Be a Public Author, which described the fictional Plug’s erratic and drunken quest around a series of non-fictional appearances by Booker prize winners, in search of the secrets of their success. When he wrote it, Ewen was the self-published author of one previous book. Now with a publisher and a residency he is no longer an outsider (he appears with authors including Toby Litt on Friday night), and the next novel will reflect this.

“The new book is Francis Plug as a published author,” he says when I phone to ask whether he plans to use this weekend as material. “He is privy to more insights and being part of the festival is part of that.”

Ewen sends up the publicity circus that surrounds publishing, rather than authors themselves, and saw comic potential in the spectacle of “a reserved and studious person who spends most of their time cooped up, suddenly on stage in front of a crowd”. Francis Plug’s unique apprenticeship was not to authors but to the salespeople they had become.

Ewen thinks the huge tents, lights and cameras of the big books festivals can make writers feel further away from readers than ever. “Celebrity seeps into it and I’m not sure how useful that is,” he says. But he found hearing JG Ballard speak in public about his work “incredibly interesting” and thinks such events can still offer inspiration. I’m just glad I can see Greenwich while it’s still a start-up.

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