Ireland’s plethora of literary luminaries has given birth to new ways of celebrating books, not least a three-day gathering that goes well beyond writers.
It’s the middle of the day in rural Ireland and I’m enjoying an unlikely cup of tea with longtime Radiohead – and lately Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds –bass player Colin Greenwood. We’re seated in the even unlikelier setting of the drawing room of a stately Regency-era manor in picturesque County Carlow.
But this ain’t rock ’n’ roll, this is literature, and Greenwood is here to talk books and ideas. The dark-haired British musician and his Kiwi interlocutor, not to mention the 2400 paying fans milling around on the lawns outside, have turned up for a refreshingly different take on books here in the land where scribblers were never meant to write in English but ended up commanding it.
Welcome to the Borris House Festival of Writing & Ideas. It’s where musicians and actors get to share equal billing with illustrious authors, academics, journalists, architects and others.
At Borris, the emphasis is on the novel and novelty. It’s a shift that’s noticeable elsewhere on Ireland’s literary map as well.
“If you have the words,” the Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney famously offered, “there’s always a chance that you’ll find the way.”
Yet in recent times, in common with their counterparts elsewhere, those who organise events around words find their work is cut out dealing with rival technology, infernal politics and slumping ticket sales.
The Borris festival, named after the nearby bucolic village, is one of many examples of the republic’s quest to repackage traditional literary events in ways better suited to the younger generation, as well as bringing in new punters at home and from abroad.
The three-day gathering follows the recognisable readers and writers’ festival format insofar as panels and discussions go. But it’s a much broader tent – as broad as the huge marquees for the various sessions dotted around the manor’s rolling grounds.
In Greenwood’s case, he’s not here to play his music (though he sneaks a bit of that in late one rainy evening) but as one of the headline presenters. He likes to say he’s not so much an acclaimed bassist as someone who just happens to be “in a band with other people”. At this gig, though, it’s not the bass guitar he’s playing but the role of surprisingly adept on-stage interviewer.
In addition to Greenwood quizzing authors on subjects such as the metaphysical poet John Donne or arcane classical instrumentation, this year’s guests included actor Rupert Everett, discussing the art of memoir writing, and Kristin Scott Thomas, reading aloud from selected works by Kafka.
There were, as well, plenty of divergent panels on such matters as the Middle East, American higher education and its Trumpian discontents, and – but of course – Irish poetry. Among the guest authors were Booker winner Anne Enright, journalist and literary editor Fintan O’Toole, Harvard’s Steven Pinker and dozens of others.
Previous years have seen U2’s Adam Clayton holding forth on the virtues of horticultural books – he’s a fanatical gardener – and former Midnight Oil songwriter and guitarist Jim Moginie, whose memoir The Silver River was released last year, discussing childhood adoption.
If music fans by tickets for several days, perhaps those in the world of books might do something similar
The only predictable thing seems to be keeping things unpredictable, Greenwood declares, and, if the speed with which the event routinely sells out is anything to go by, there are no shortage of takers.
“In my musical work, I’m sort of already an interviewer in the band, if that makes sense,” he says, referring to his involvement in last year’s Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds album Wild God and subsequent touring (they’re playing in Wellington in February). Maybe, he suggests, what he’s doing here isn’t so far removed.
Growing stale
The Borris fiesta, begun in 2012, is the brain child of one-time rock promoter Hugo Jellett, whose background was in arts and music extravaganzas, including Ireland’s Electric Picnic and its British equivalent, Latitude, where guests also typically attend for an entire weekend of surprises.
Along with Vivienne Guinness from Dublin’s Lilliput Press, Jellett reasoned that if music fans could be persuaded to buy tickets for several days, perhaps their counterparts in the world of books might be prepared to do something similar. An event where the idea would be “to get people to have to go to talks that they didn’t really expect or want to go to”. Something they would thank you for only afterwards.
Prompting the thought was his growing conviction that familiar literary-fest style has grown a little stale. From Dublin to Dunedin – both places where the festival format has been imported from the Edinburgh festival model – we all know the drill. Authors getting interviewed by fellow authors. Authors retelling their most shop-worn stories. Oh, and authors answering predictable queries from audience members, including at least one every session, agonisingly prefaced by “I have a comment and question”, that relates to absolutely nothing the author has been speaking about. Authors wearily signing copies of their latest work, before driving off like Snoopy into the dark and stormy night.
In this scenario, a prospective punter may show up for just the one admired speaker. They may have driven some distance to the event, clutching just a single ticket to see their favourite scribe.
“And no one, presenters or attendees, learns anything new about anything,” Jellett says pulling a face. “They just admire more the speakers that they already admire. But that doesn’t really take you anywhere, does it?”
Thinking of the environmental impact of long drives for short sessions, Jellett and Guinness decided from the start not to sell tickets for individual appearances. Opting for an out-of-the-way location deep in the rural garden of Ireland and shadowed by the Blackstairs Mountains, the hope was that this might keep people at the venue for a longer periods.
The gamble paid off. Three-day tickets to Borris typically sell out in hours; the biggest problem for Jellett and his small team is finding new ways to meet the outsize demand. Punters either stay on site, many camping in nearby fields, in the local village here in Ireland’s second-smallest county or in towns further away.
This newfound activity comes as organisers of literary-themed events grapple with a host of challenges, whether the aftermath of Covid shutdowns, changing reading habits or political pressures.
True, the Auckland Writers Festival and others around the country are still the bomb with punters. But even here the familiar audience demographics, give or take organised school visits, hint at problems in the years ahead: too many clusters of grey hair and high-tone accents, too many people with disposable time and income on their hands, too few young people.
Overseas, some festival organisers have had the additional issue of authors rebelling against sponsors with links to perceived environmental despoilers or politically unpopular investment portfolios. Most New Zealand festivals only wish they had such large-scale sponsors in the first place.
Tourism lure
Events such as Borris have also struck a chord with government planners and tour operators in Ireland who are always looking to spruce up the local literary experience in a country where tourism is a leading contributor to GDP, even though earnings have dipped in recent years.
In Dublin, a Unesco City of Literature, I had already visited the dedicated pavilion at Trinity College housing the republic’s most famous medieval manuscript, the Book of Kells. This illuminated manuscript of the Christian gospels dates from the early ninth century. What’s billed as the Book of Kells Experience is hardly musty, however, with nearly a million visitors each year learning about the ancient text by way of immersive light shows and kaleidoscopic digital displays.
Across town at the Irish Emigration Museum (Epic), a similar touch is evident. The museum knits old-fashioned storytelling with decidedly new-fashioned immersive technology to share the nation’s wrenching history of migration, including 19th-century emigration to New Zealand (which is the first thing you see after clearing the entrance). The museum also currently offers a series of popular talks, “Éire to Everywhere”, where local authors come in to talk books.
In towns and cities, a growing number of festivals are out on the streets as well. Dublin’s annual Bloomsday event, which homes in on James Joyce’s classic stream-of-consciousness novel, Ulysses, famously features kerbside readings, performances, costume parades and walking tours in the dizzy spirit of the book’s 18 episodes set across a single day in 1904.
Another popular event in the capital, the darkly atmospheric Bram Stoker Festival, is a goth-style celebration of the life and works of the creator of Dracula.
The activity has been such that some tourist operators are now focusing mainly, or in one case exclusively, on literary-themed tourism.
Dubliner Niamh Martin runs a travel agency purely devoted to literary tourism, broadly pitching her wares to visiting authors, journalists, retreat organisers or simply well-read sojourners.
“It’s opening up as a particular type of tourism,” she reports of the emerging market. “In terms of where the trend might go or when it might stop, I honestly don’t know – but right now, yes, it’s massively evolving.”
Éire to Aotearoa?
But could another small nation pull off something similar? Ireland is lucky to boast one of the richest literary traditions in the world. With a population almost exactly the same as New Zealand’s, the nation has churned out a ridiculous number of admired authors, including four Nobel laureates.
A slew of living Irish writers appear to have a virtual lock on prestigious international accolades, notching up six wins and numerous nominations for the Booker Prize. Also – more apposite – the marbled locales of famous authors such as Joyce and Yeats have always been big drawcards.
But Jellett, the Borris chief, insists any country can reap the benefits of its own literary traditions and events, at least with the right amount of creative thought and a decent dollop of the kind of patience he has practised for several years trying to get Eleanor Catton to be a part of his new-style festival experience.
“This is a long game,” Jellett says. “I know everyone hates hearing about how they must be patient about everything, but it’s true. “If, for example, someone says they can’t make it one year – as Eleanor did a few years ago – then maybe they will make it the next year or the year after that. They’ll make it some time. So, persistence takes a lot longer than you think.
The Borris festival is one of many examples of the republic’s quest to repackage traditional literary events in ways better suited to the younger generation,
“And the second thing is that writers really do want to be somewhere talking to people who do other things. Other than talking with each other about the craft of writing, they want to talk about other people’s creative babies. And when you unlock that, a lot can and will happen.”
Which is where the rock ’n’ roll thing comes into play, he says with a knowing chuckle. Many established authors, after all, secretly want to be rock stars, and many rock stars would rather fancy becoming “serious” authors. What’s more, both groups like hanging out with matinee idols.
And yes, audience members like being in the company of all three categories, who they’ll tend to bump into at one or other of the “environmentally sustainable” food queues and elsewhere during a long weekend at Borris.
What about the possibilities more broadly for “literary tourism” for New Zealand?
“Everything is possible,” Martin says. “I suppose it’s looking at what the attractions in New Zealand might be and what you can work with.”
The lyrics to God Defend New Zealand, she points out, were written by Thomas Bracken, an Irish-born poet and journalist, while the music they were set to was courtesy of Joseph Woods, who also happened to be Irish by heritage and married to an Irish-born woman.
“You could always start there,” Martin suggests brightly.
Sounds like something worth investigating at a certain kind of future book festival in Christchurch or Featherston. Perhaps with Hayley Westenra or Anika Moa as the unexpected interviewers. Or Colin Greenwood.
David Cohen is a New Zealand writer who appears frequently at local book festivals. He was assisted in Ireland by Tourism Ireland.