The famous and read – The Hay List of ‘Who is Who’

The 2009 Guardian Hay Literature Festival totalled over 400 events over a period of ten days, bringing together some 600-700 writers, journalists, politicians, scholars, and academics to present their new books and talk about the social, the personal and the political. In order to gain a better feeling for the iconic dimension of the Hay Literature festival, consider that, in Germany, its counterpart in terms of its guests would be the Leipzig Book Fair or the Cologne Literature Festival expanded to include the guests of the political TV shows of Anne Will (ARD) or Maybrit Illner (ZDF), the talk shows of Sandra Maisberger (ARD) or Johannes Kerner (ZDF) and the invited speakers on the philosophical and literary quartets. Characteristically, on 26 May 2009, ‘The Guardian’ published a photograph with the caption ‘Can you spot the Cabinet Minister?’ In the same issue several well-known writers were asked to reveal their literary inspirations.

The Hay Festival does make an attempt to introduce new authors, but, admittedly, these tend to get ‘lost’ in the numerous other events featuring – in parallel – prominent speakers and getting all the media attention. One hour-event, for instance, was scheduled for 09:00 am on Sunday, 24 May to present a total of 10 (!) new authors to the festival public. Authors with a multicultural or ethnic background also lag behind, as do those delivering non-mainstream stories. The ‘dream stage’ (with a capacity of 120) and only rarely the Oxfam stage (with a capacity of 200) are reserved for such events, as they obviously do not attract large audiences. A very interesting (and amusing) discussion of the meaning of homeland and ethnic identity, featuring Brian Chikwava and Samir el-Youssef, was one of the events that demonstrated how ‘mainstream’ literature is defined by ‘familiarity’ and tacit knowledge and, in turn, that this is associated with living (and writing) in a country that is your ‘own’ and which you have not left (or fled from), other than for holidays, and to which you feel ‘organically’ bound (in Durkheim’s sense).

Books in translation are also conspicuously absent – a rare exception is de Ignacio Martínez de Pisón, who presents his recently translated book To Bury the Dead about the Spanish Civil War. It is well known that fewer books are translated into English than into either French or German – even after taking the larger literary production in the English language into account. The lack of books in translation probably also has something to do with the fact that foreign authors invited to the festival to speak in English might not be as easy to understand or entertaining as authors writing in English. The Hay Festival tries to make up for its linguistic and cultural insularity by promoting ‘sister’ festivals abroad – Beirut 2010, which is expected to bring together some 39 writers of Arab provenance under 40, was launched at Hay; and money was collected for the literature festival in Nairobi. Yet this approach tends to smack of late modern colonialism, at least to someone like myself who originally came from an ex-colony.
What would happen if the Hay Literature Festival were to open up to writers in translation? Would there be reason to fear that visitor numbers might decline? I doubt it. The core of the festival’s audience is made up of liberals– the types who read ‘The Guardian’ and enjoy listening to BBC Radio4. The equivalent in France would be readers of ‘Le Monde’ and/or ‘Liberation’, watching or listening to ARTE, and in Germany readers of the weekly ‘Die Zeit’ and listeners to and viewers of Deutschlandradio Kultur or 3SAT. Such people are usually open to new challenges and hence might respond positively to literary diversity – even if that requires that they shift their point of view somewhat away from the obviously familiar.