Literary Festivals and Contemporary Book Culture

There has been a proliferation of literary festivals in recent decades, with more than 450 held annually in the UK and Australia alone. These festivals operate as tastemakers shaping cultural consumption; as educational and policy projects; as instantiations, representations, and celebrations of literary communities; and as cultural products in their own right. As such they strongly influence how literary culture is produced, circulates and is experienced by readers in the twenty-first century. This book explores how audiences engage with literary festivals, and analyses these festivals’ relationship to local and digital literary communities, to the creative industries focus of contemporary cultural policy, and to the broader literary field. The relationship between literary festivals and these configuring forces is illustrated with in-depth case studies of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Port Eliot Festival, the Melbourne Writers Festival, the Emerging Writers’ Festival, and the Clunes Booktown Festival. Building on interviews with audiences and staff, contextualised by a large-scale online survey of literary festival audiences from around the world, this book investigates these festivals’ social, cultural, commercial, and political operation. In doing so, this book critically orients scholarly investigation of literary festivals with respect to the complex and contested terrain of contemporary book culture.   

“She proffers a back-to-basics understanding of literary festivals that reconnects the enduring love triangle of author, reader, and book while appealing to the likes of academics, policymakers, and festival organizers. … Literary Festivals and Contemporary Book Culture is a solid step in formulating a comprehensive approach to analyzing literary festivals and their appeal to book enthusiasts and literary critics alike.” (Gloria Mulvihill and Nicholas Shea, Publishing Research Quarterly, 2019)

Millicent Weber is a Lecturer in English at the Australian National University, where she is part of the Reading at the Interface project team. Her work on literary festivals has been published by scholarly journals Continuum and Convergence and literary magazine Overland, and she co-edited the collection Publishing Means Business: Australian Perspectives (2017).