Book festival chief admits she feared new home would not be ready for this August

Jenny Niven has admitted that she feared that its planned new bass at the Edinburgh Futures Institute was not going to be ready shortly after starting in her role in the autumn.

The complex, which has been created at the former Edinburgh Royal Infirmary on Lauriston Place, was only opened to the public by Edinburgh University at the beginning of June after a seven-year project.

And the “village green” space which is playing host to many of its events and its bookshop was only brought into use for the first time when the first events were staged at the weekend.

The book festival spent three years at Edinburgh College of Art's campus after relocating from its long-time home in Charlotte Square Garden, in August 2011, when the event returned after being forced to go completely online by the Covid pandemic.

A new long-term home for the festival, first staged in 1983, was announced in May 2022 by the then director Nick Barley, who pledged that it would offer an “unforgettable experience” for audiences and authors.

However Mr Barley announced last February that he would be stepping down after the 2023 festival.

Ms Niven, who started as director in September, said there was a question mark over whether the festival would even have a venue for this August.

Speaking at one of the first events at the EFI site, she said: “The Edinburgh Futures Institute is amazing. It has been in the works for a while that we were going to move here.

"But as with any capital project, it has had its ups and downs.

"There was a slightly hairy moment in September when I had just taken on this job when it looked like it wasn’t going to be finished.

"When I came into the building at that time they were literally still piecing parts of it together.

"The architects have done an incredible job. You can clearly see the heritage of the building and what it was used for in the past. You could see that even more clearly when bits of it were exposed.

"We are doing an amazing project, Words From the Wards. The whole point of it is to connect with people who knew the building when it was a hospital, and worked here, were born here or had their children here.” 

Ms Niven, who was speaking to author and broadcaster Yassmin Abdel-Magied, reflected on some of the over challenges faced by the festival, including reduced ticket sales, controversy over its Baillie Gifford sponsorship and uncertainty over its future public funding.

She added: "The festival is still a transitional point in a lot of ways, post-Covid.

“For instance, there isn’t a clear set of data about ticket sales from the last few years. 

"It’s quite hard to make plans and projections when the last few years have been so all over the place.

"There was consistent growth - and some might say too much growth - during the period between 2014 and 2019. Things got bigger and bigger and bigger, and there were pieces of funding which made that possible.

“Everything changed in 2020. We have been building things without a consistent bedrock, in a way. ”Public funding is a really strange spot at the moment. Everybody in the Scottish cultural sector will find out shortly what their new public funding settlements are.

"As you know, we had our own challenges from within the writing community, who objected to our Baillie Gifford sponsorship, which came up with Greta Thunberg’s withdrawal from the programme this time last year.

"If you had said to me six months before that that was on the cards I might not have believed you.

“It was a total curveball. It’s been really difficult and we still have got a lot to learn from that.”