BOOK FESTIVAL FALLOUT

Four literary festivals have recently cut their ties with the investment management company Baillie Gifford after coming under pressure over its connections with both the fossil fuel industry and Israel, writes Gary Dalkin.

BG is best known in the book world for sponsoring the £50,000 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, formerly the Samuel Johnson Prize, one of the most generous literary prizes in the world. It has also been heavily involved in supporting literary festivals, but in the last few weeks the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Hay Festival, the Borders Book Festival and Cheltenham Literature Festival all ended their relationships with the company.

Allan Little, chair of the Edinburgh festival’s board was reported in The Scotsman as saying, ‘Activists in Fossil Free Books and Art Workers for Palestine accused Baillie Gifford of having substantial investments in oil and gas, and of investing in companies which operate in Israel, and accused the Hay Festival of what they call complicity in genocide. ‘They took that word and pinned it on a book festival, on its staff and any individual author willing to appear. When you do that you put a toxic smell on blameless people, in a climate of cancel culture.

‘By the Friday morning of the first week there were so many withdrawals that the programme was falling apart in the director’s hands and the festival was collapsing. They calculated they would lose hundreds of thousands of pounds in ticket refunds. […]

‘We saw how the activists had the power and determination to put a book festival out of business and we knew they intended to do the same with us. […]

‘Some have argued that we caved in to bullying and made the wrong decision. But we couldn’t ask our staff to spend the next 10 weeks in this atmosphere preparing for a festival that would begin to fall apart even before it had opened.’