A quiet revolution

From Helen Taylor at Times Higher Education…

The glorious Glastonbury Festival has come and gone again, and the West Country says goodbye to its pilgrim backpackers. But while the big music jamborees make headlines, a quieter revolution has occurred around literature festivals.

There is no doubt that such festivals, mushrooming and drawing in large enthusiastic audiences everywhere, have become the cosmopolitan and internationalist debating societies, political hustings, Open University-style summer schools and adult education classes of our age. Despite the virtual worlds in which we are all said to be living, many people – admittedly mainly white, middle class and middle-aged or older – yearn for live intellectual stimulation and want to celebrate and interrogate new as well as celebrity writers.

Established festivals such as Edinburgh, Cheltenham and Oxford are being jostled by lively new ones in small towns and villages across the UK. The larger ones now have offshoots in other countries, while the major TED international thinkers’ forum, for two decades held in Long Beach, California, ran a smaller version last month in Oxford. More…

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