Since its founding in 1983, the Edinburgh International Book Festival has aspired to be more than just a stage for acclaimed writers. It has sought to celebrate and share the transformative power of writing and ideas, welcoming both global icons and new voices. Over the years, the festival has hosted figures as varied as Toni Morrison, Noam Chomsky, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Benjamin Zephaniah, alongside an ever-renewing wave of debut authors. This year, the guiding theme was “repair,” a notion that resonates powerfully in our current moment. In this dispatch, Réne Esaú Sánchez, an Editor-at-Large for Asymptote, takes us inside the festival.
Edinburgh in August is not for the faint of heart. The city thrums with competing energies: tourists packed into every corner of the Royal Mile, actors leafleting with desperate smiles, magicians performing in the middle of the crowd, and, this year, the Oasis reunion concerts adding their own heavy dose of nostalgia to the mix. This year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival, tucked inside the Edinburgh Futures Institute and caught between the Fringe’s relentless performances and the surging crowds, the Festival carved out a rare space for reflection amid the urban cacophony.
Framing the theme of “repair” as its central invitation, Jenny Niven, the Festival’s CEO and Director, sought to share both hope and resilience: “This year’s key theme of repair starts from the belief that the brilliant ideas of writers and thinkers can help us repair a host of seemingly ‘broken’ things in our society, from the cycle of fast fashion and our relationship with the environment, to cultural reparations and the state of our politics.”Big words demand big answers. And yes, the names on the programme were dazzling (this year Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah, Ian McEwan, and Booker Prize winner Samantha Harvey all appeared), but the real draw was the promise that words, ideas, and stories can stitch something together in a fractured world.
One of the most striking contributions came from Robert Macfarlane, launching his new book Is a River Alive? Its central idea is as simple as it is powerful:“We take rivers for granted. And if they run through us, how can they not be alive?” Macfarlane’s response to his title’s question is not abstract. He argues that rivers should be treated as living beings with rights. This is not as far-fetched as some may think. For instance, Macfarlane told the story of Los Cedros, a cloud forest in Ecuador saved from mining by constitutional recognition of the Rights of Nature.
If a river can be alive, it follows that it can also be killed. “We know what this looks like,” Macfarlane said, “we know how it feels. A dying river is one who does not reach the sea; a dying river’s fish float with the belly-up in stagnant pools.” He spoke of paddling along the Mutehekau Shipu in Canada, now at risk from dam projects, and of the Adyar in Chennai, which he said is“as close to death as any river I’ve seen in my life.”
What struck me most about Macfarlane’s work was his insistance that the book was written with others, in an echo of the more collective, less individualistic forms of life his work describes. The voices of others flow naturally into Macfarlane’s book—his own thought runs together with the insights of mycologist Giuliana Furci, who discovered two new species of fungi in Los Cedros; the Indian naturalist and writer Yuvan Aves, who explores with Macfarlane the death and “ghostification” of the three rivers in Chennai; and the climber and artist Wayne Chambliss, who travels with the author across the Mutehekau Shipu in Canada, trying to read what the earth is saying.
But perhaps Macfarlane’s most suggestive companions are the rivers themselves. As he emphasized multiple times, his book is “written with the rivers who run through its pages: the Río Los Cedros, the Adyar, the Cooum and the Kosasthalaiyar, the Mutehekau Shipu, the mighty St Lawrence and the clear-watered stream who flows unnamed from the spring that rises at Nine Wells Wood, a mile from my house. They are my co-authors.” The use of who is not a coincidence: Macfarlane insists that if rivers are alive, we should stop “it-ing” them; if they are to be subjects with rights, we must begin addressing them as such. In this sense, granting agency to a living entity feels necessary, and it raises the question of what else Nature might do and create. Like the Festival itself, Is a River Alive? is a collective project, reminding us that repair is not, and will never be, a solitary act.
The Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage, also spoke at the Festival about his most recent book, Dwell, inspired by his time in Cornwall. The book explores how Nature inspires us to create art and so touches on some of the themes Macfarlane introduced. Interestingly, however, Armitage’s presentation quickly veered away from Nature and into a discussion of AI—which itself poses a threat to our rivers as it accelerates water loss.
The discussion was sparked by an audience question and by Armitage’s acknowledgment that he, like many writers, has experimented with AI. For him, the troubling part is that large language models will only grow more sophisticated, and he wonders whether we might return to an aesthetic regime in which we value art primarily for how difficult it is to replicate or imitate. Beyond the speculation that these technologies provoke, I find it curious how they ended up “breaking into” or “intervening in” a conversation about art and nature. Can we no longer think of them apart from technology? More importantly, could an AI ever write with that profound sense of belonging and co-existence present in both Is a River Alive? and Dwell? Yet perhaps I am asking from the wrong direction: what does nature say about AI? What do rivers say about our literature?
Stepping out of the space of the festival and back into Edinburgh’s chaos, one realises that repair doesn’t mean restoring some lost calm. It means learning to walk differently, through forests, languages, bodies, and cities…even when the streets are crowded and everyone is singing Wonderwall.
René Esaú Sánchez (Guerrero, México. 1997). Journalist and translator. He writes about politics and culture weekly for the Mexican magazine Vértigo. He has translated Iris Murdoch into Spanish and Rosario Castellanos into English. He has also collaborated with publications such as Periódico de Poesía, Reflexiones Marginales, and the Trinity Journal of Literary Translation. Currently, he serves as an editor-at-large in México for Asymptote Journal and studies an MLitt in Comparative Literature at the University of St. Andrews.
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