Regime literature is stifling the Edinburgh book festival

How do you score an invite to speak at Scotland’s biggest literary festival? Being a popular, critically favoured, award-winning Scottish writer certainly doesn’t help.

A few authors are conspicuous for their absence at this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival, which begins later this week. The first is rapper, writer and journalist Darren McGarvey, whose latest book, Trauma Industrial Complex, is published later this month. Another is Susan Dalgety, who co-authored The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, a bestselling account of the gender-critical fightback against the Scottish government’s assault on women’s sex-based rights.

The titles of the books were probably enough on their own to ensure the exclusion of their authors. Trauma Industrial Complex looks at the trend of emotional ‘oversharing’ and the rise of therapeutic culture. It questions whether this has done any good for those who have endured genuinely traumatic events. McGarvey’s other works have looked at issues such as poverty and addiction from a distinctly working-class perspective. His 2018 book, Poverty Safari, won him the Orwell Prize. Meanwhile, Dalgety’s The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht celebrates the bravery of a small number of Scottish women who defied abuse and accusations of ‘transphobia’ to defeat the SNP’s gender self-identification laws. As she put it on X, ‘It appears the Edinburgh Book Festival doesn’t like people who talk about class or women’s rights’.

A spokeswoman for the book festival has denied that McGarvey and Dalgety have been ‘cancelled’. ‘The Edinburgh Book Festival is committed to hosting a broad range of informed and nuanced conversations’, a statement said. ‘Our 2025 programme includes authors with a diverse range of perspectives on many subjects.’

But attendees might be disappointed to discover that while dissent is excluded from the festival, the establishment is well represented. Indeed, one of the headliners is none other than former Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon. Sturgeon – whose former chief of staff is now running the festival – has been given a plush slot to discuss her upcoming memoir, Frankly, and her ‘evolution from a shy working-class child to one of Scotland’s most significant political leaders’. Other famous ‘authors’ to have been invited to past festivals include eco-activist Greta Thunberg and Katrín Jakobsdóttir, the ultra-woke former prime minister of Iceland, who tried her hand at writing a crime novel. Never mind that they’re not even proper writers.

Tragically, this is what your typical book festival looks like nowadays. It has nothing really to do with books. It’s not about giving a leg up to hardworking authors trying to make their way in a particularly difficult industry, or even about recognising the talents of established writers, like McGarvey or Dalgety. Instead, it has become a stale PR opportunity for the media and political establishment. It is a celebration of regime literature, overseen by suitably vetted party members.

This is why it’s hardly a surprise that Edinburgh’s book festival has become about as popular as Sturgeon herself. For years, it has been beset by declining audiences. It seems the only people who are welcome are intolerant activists – the kind who pressured the festival into biting the only hand willing to feed it last year, when it cut ties with its sponsor, Baillie Gifford, for its investments in fossil fuels.

The sterile atmosphere that has enveloped Edinburgh’s once-vibrant festival season was captured by Scottish first minister John Swinney, who opened the Edinburgh International Festival last week. After he proclaimed, unconvincingly, that the arts are part of ‘who I am’, the audience might have expected him to say something about the music and novels that shaped him. Instead, he droned on about the ‘climate emergency’, which apparently gets ‘ever more acute every day’. He also inveighed against ‘austerity’ and, of course, ‘disinformation’.

The golden age of Edinburgh’s festivals has long since passed. As the recent removal of two Jewish comedians from the Fringe due to supposed ‘safety’ concerns demonstrates, it has become a hotbed of intolerance and extreme wokery. As many are beginning to discover, the annual pilgrimage to Edinburgh is becoming less worthwhile every year.

Hugo Timms is an editorial assistant at spiked.