The penultimate day of the Edinburgh International Book Festival was still full of plenty of events and big names. Amongst reports of the heartache of Fringe shows’ audience numbers ‘falling off a cliff’ in the final week, the Michael Pedersen and Friends event showed no signs of this being the case in the glorious Spiegeltent. Had they saved the best for (almost) last? Well, each of the guests in the line-up was enough to pull people in to see them individually: Gordon Buchanan, Douglas Stuart, and Iona Zajac.
Edinburgh Makar (Poet Laureate) Pedersen introduced himself and tried to pull all of his guests together by a common thread of islands. He, Stuart, and Buchanan were an easy grouping—Iona, well, Iona is the name of an island. Enough said. Pedersen talked a little—not too much, this wasn’t all about him—about his own novel Muckle Flugga and recited the opening of it before introducing Douglas Stuart to the stage.
He knows it off by heart and, as a poet, is used to kenning things by heart. By his own admission, that’s a bit of a double-edged sword when it comes to ‘reciting’ part of a novel. If you get it wrong or lose the place, you’ve pretty well had it! But he was fine and the lyrical prose of Muckle Flugga almost certainly helps.
Douglas Stuart is currently promoting his third published novel John of John, set on the island of Harris. He gave us a potted life history and perhaps surprised some audience members by saying he’d been writing for nigh on twenty years and was no ‘flash in the pan’, though did concede that winning the Booker with his first novel Shuggie Bain was well beyond any dreams he could have had.
Stuart appears quite self-contained, perhaps shy even, but seems willing to share a lot with the audience. He showed refreshing honesty about driving his husband so mad at times that when he said he was off to the Hebrides for three months, his husband asked if he thought that would be enough time! Stuart is self-deprecating and quiet-ish, but anyone who has met him, even briefly, will tell you that he’s kind, welcoming and warm. A man you’d love to spend a long time getting to know better.
From Hebridean Isolation to Polar Bears: Gordon Buchanan and Iona Zajac
Gordon Buchanan was next, and indeed he IS one of Pedersen’s friends, the two of them having met and worked together over the last year or two. This made for a very comfortable and chummy conversation, with Pedersen feeding Buchanan the lines for the latter to tell us some great stories of his adventures.
If you don’t know about his encounter with a polar bear, go online and take a look. More scary than meeting Attenborough. Well the polar bear was truly life-threatening; Attenborough just overwhelmingly awe-inspiring. Buchanan tells his stories well, especially when taking the rise out of himself. His programmes speak for themselves, but Buchanan gives you a bit more of the inside story. Brilliant.
“Had they saved the best for (almost) last? Well, each of the guests in the line-up was enough to pull people in to see them individually: Gordon Buchanan, Douglas Stuart, and Iona Zajac.”
Last up was musician Iona Zajac. OK, well you might not have heard of Zajac—yet—but her new album Bang is out, and she’s been touring with The Pogues. And Shirley Manson thinks she’s epic, so who am I to disagree? And indeed I do agree. London-born Zajac studied English at Glasgow University and loves the poetry of Emily Dickinson amongst others. She’d been writing poetry before Covid struck and then during the lockdown she picked up her guitar and started turning the poems into songs.
She says now she writes songs not poems—she sees a definite distinction—though some of her lyrics are very poetic. She has a beautiful, clear voice, which she accompanies with guitar and if you’ve not heard her work, I’d highly recommend that you go find her tracks right now. She was a bit starry-eyed, given the august company she was in, and I found that absolutely real and very endearing—but before the others left the stage to allow her to do her set, she held her own in conversation with Pedersen. This girl is going places.
Pedersen holds on to the well-worn epithets of being fey, impish, mercurial and all the rest, but he’s a great host for this sort of event. He’s one amongst equals and facilitates his guests to shine as brightly as that Muckle Flugga lighthouse beam.
Featured Image: Douglas Stuart – Author Pic
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