Auld Reekie has writers deep in its bones, so there is no more appropriate city to hold a book festival
Patrick White spent his schooldays in Cheltenham ("a four-year prison sentence"), and Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard got together illicitly there, but that's about all that underpins its claims to be a book town. Hay's feeble best boast is the diary-scribbling Rev Francis Kilvert, who had a nearby parish. Of the places that host the UK's major literary festivals, only Oxford's credentials come close to Edinburgh's, and most Oxonian writers have been transients, not residents.
Anyone arriving by train for the book festival disembarks at Waverley station, surely the only transport hub in Europe (anywhere?) named after a series of novels. If you turn left after emerging onto Princes Street, their creator is looming over you, in the vast Gothic form of the 200ft-high (Walter) Scott Monument. Have you got the message yet? If not, you could turn right, and head for the more modest, but still imposing monuments to Robbie Burns and David Hume on Calton Hill.
Probably, though, you want to get to the festival site, in Charlotte Square off the far end of Princes Street. Head north and uphill from the station into the New Town, and a zig-zagging westward walk towards it can take in the birthplaces or homes of Scott, Arthur Conan Doyle, Kenneth Grahame and Robert Louis Stevenson, the favourite pubs of Hugh MacDiarmid and Norman MacCaig, and the grave of Thomas de Quincey.
But that may all seem overly fusty. So instead you could turn left off Princes Street and set off, across Waverley Bridge, for the Old Town, where paradoxically the traces tend to be of more recent work. You soon reach the George IV Bridge, home to the cafe where the then-unknown JK Rowling used to write, and Deacon Brodie's Tavern – commemorating a figure who may have inspired Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and who is also echoed in the name of Kate Atkinson's detective, Jackson Brodie – where the Trainspotting gang drink.
Nearby on or off the Royal Mile are the Fringe venue where Tom Stoppard's career began with the 1966 premiere of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and the cobbles where Alasdair Gray's secretary, Rodge Glass, may or may not have saved his life by inserting himself beneath the falling writer.
Walking south from it takes you (possibly via the interestingly named Potterow) towards St Leonard's police station, base of Ian Rankin's Inspector Rebus, and Rankeillor Street, where David Nicholls lived and set the opening of One Day. By then you're close to Bruntsfield, Muriel Spark's birthplace and the location of the Marcia Blaine School for Girls in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Everywhere there are reminders – inspiringly or dauntingly, for today's authors? – that Edinburgh has few rivals as a literary city. Reported by guardian.co.uk 6 hours ago.
Patrick White spent his schooldays in Cheltenham ("a four-year prison sentence"), and Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard got together illicitly there, but that's about all that underpins its claims to be a book town. Hay's feeble best boast is the diary-scribbling Rev Francis Kilvert, who had a nearby parish. Of the places that host the UK's major literary festivals, only Oxford's credentials come close to Edinburgh's, and most Oxonian writers have been transients, not residents.
Anyone arriving by train for the book festival disembarks at Waverley station, surely the only transport hub in Europe (anywhere?) named after a series of novels. If you turn left after emerging onto Princes Street, their creator is looming over you, in the vast Gothic form of the 200ft-high (Walter) Scott Monument. Have you got the message yet? If not, you could turn right, and head for the more modest, but still imposing monuments to Robbie Burns and David Hume on Calton Hill.
Probably, though, you want to get to the festival site, in Charlotte Square off the far end of Princes Street. Head north and uphill from the station into the New Town, and a zig-zagging westward walk towards it can take in the birthplaces or homes of Scott, Arthur Conan Doyle, Kenneth Grahame and Robert Louis Stevenson, the favourite pubs of Hugh MacDiarmid and Norman MacCaig, and the grave of Thomas de Quincey.
But that may all seem overly fusty. So instead you could turn left off Princes Street and set off, across Waverley Bridge, for the Old Town, where paradoxically the traces tend to be of more recent work. You soon reach the George IV Bridge, home to the cafe where the then-unknown JK Rowling used to write, and Deacon Brodie's Tavern – commemorating a figure who may have inspired Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and who is also echoed in the name of Kate Atkinson's detective, Jackson Brodie – where the Trainspotting gang drink.
Nearby on or off the Royal Mile are the Fringe venue where Tom Stoppard's career began with the 1966 premiere of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and the cobbles where Alasdair Gray's secretary, Rodge Glass, may or may not have saved his life by inserting himself beneath the falling writer.
Walking south from it takes you (possibly via the interestingly named Potterow) towards St Leonard's police station, base of Ian Rankin's Inspector Rebus, and Rankeillor Street, where David Nicholls lived and set the opening of One Day. By then you're close to Bruntsfield, Muriel Spark's birthplace and the location of the Marcia Blaine School for Girls in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Everywhere there are reminders – inspiringly or dauntingly, for today's authors? – that Edinburgh has few rivals as a literary city. Reported by guardian.co.uk 6 hours ago.