In the autumn of 1945, the Scotsman newspaper reported excitedly on an ambitious project to establish Edinburgh as a world centre for music and drama. It would host the first great postwar international art assembly in Europe, with a mission to celebrate the “flowering of the human spirit”. Two years later, the Edinburgh international festival was born.
Seven decades on, that flowering might sometimes appear overabundant. Scotland alone has 18 book festivals this year, while the Association of Festival Organisers, which is currently updating a survey from 2022, estimates that, despite a ripple of post-Covid closures, there will as many as 900 music jamborees across the UK. Faced with the double whammy of shrinking incomes and vanishing subsidies, prices have risen and audiences have aged, while organisers face an annual scramble to fill gaping holes in their budgets that yawn wider the more brave and imaginative they are. Meanwhile, the search for alternative sources of funding, either from business or from overseas, has been repeatedly complicated by ethical issues.
A glimpse of why these gatherings still matter unfolded in microcosm last week in Norway’s second city of Bergen, where over five days, writers from around the world debated issues ranging from corruption in the oil industries of the host nation and Nigeria, to the Sami language and organised crime in El Salvador. But the coup that took the festival itself by surprise was the success of a competition inviting anyone aged between 18 and 25 to send in poems and essays on the climate crisis. A collaboration with Bergen University’s centre for climate research and a not-for-profit organisation promoting human rights, the contest attracted more than 500 entries from 117 countries after being advertised on social media. Entries included an essay on the effect of wind turbines on a small village in Brazil and a poem about the importance of bioluminescence. The results were streamed on YouTube.
Part of the purpose was to study the communication gap between scientific evidence and the storytelling capable of bringing it to life for policymakers and potential activists. As one winner pointed out, hearing about a one-degree rise in temperature or a five-inch rise in sea levels gives no sense of the catastrophic reality.
An initial data crunch yielded yet another surprise: despite the fear, trauma and sorrow surrounding environmental collapse, a word cloud of most used terms clustered around care, love and togetherness. “There is a lot of anxiety, but this is a chance to work with that anxiety towards a concern for what’s happening locally, which turns into action through the knowledge that you share with the world,” said the jury member Kerim Nisancioglu.
There are, of course, caveats around any research in progress, especially with such a small and self-selecting evidence base. But there was a palpable sense of excitement among an international delegation that included several festival directors, along with promises to follow through on the project.
At a time of collective and justified angst, when the future seems so very short, it is rare to have a chance to echo Edinburgh’s foundational belief in the flowering of the human spirit. But that is precisely the sort of imagery that is needed, not only to argue for the value of festivals as a site for the development of ideas and imagination, but also to find a language of hope that can be nurtured and shared around the world.
• This article’s photo caption was amended on 19 February 2024 to correct Kae Tempest’s name and pronouns.
