From 26 September to 5 October this year, I attended the Wigtown Book Festival as a volunteer. Wigtown is located at the English-Scottish borders, and is recognized as Scotland’s national book town after seeing the success of Hay-on-Wye. Founded in 1998, the book festival company has transformed the area into a vibrant community, and is also home to an Airbnb where guests can live above The Open Books bookstore and experience the life of a bookseller. Although the town square only contains two main streets, there are seventeen bookshops and several book-themed cafes in the main square. The book festival annually transforms this quaint little town into an assembly point for authors and book lovers, and is a perfect spot of intellectual conversations and solitude reflection.
The festival starts off with fireworks across the night sky, signalling the start of this 10-day literary festival. Throughout the festival, as I was responsible for stewarding multiple book events a day, I have had the privilege of attending many events that I may not have otherwise. Some notable ones are Claire Mitchell and Zoe Venditozzi’s ‘How to Kill a Witch’ on raising awareness on Scotland’s witch trials, Len Pennie’s poetry—poyums annaw—and her charismatic performance, and Chris McQueer’s Hermit about a mother’s fraught relationship with her incel son—recently shortlisted for the 2025 Saltires Awards. Although the annual festival ceilidh got cancelled due to poor weather, the lovely and enthusiastic festival staff and residents still managed to give us an incredible and unforgettable stay.
On the second night, I attended a Book and Bedtime event, where participants gathered around in a dimly-lit bookshop, and listened to a lively rendition of children’s books and classic songs, while sipping hot chocolate with marshmallows. The bookshop was set up as an incredibly homey and cosy circle, where everyone is given a teddy bear to coddle throughout the night. It was amazingly therapeutic and peaceful to have a bedtime story read to us adults, and we even got a surprise cameo from the Edinburgh book fairy. The 80-year-old woman is now the oldest book fairy in the world, who places books wrapped in green ribbon with a “book fairy” sticker across spots in Edinburgh. She showed up in a gorgeous book-page canvas dress with multiple large pockets for different books, and gifted one to the host Renita Boyle.
Another fascinating event was ‘A Conversation with AI about Love,’ where the chair Stuart Kelly prepared questions on the philosophy, virtues, and literature about love for ‘Amy,’ the AI that has been trained on the topic of love and is narrated vibrantly by an actress. The experience was bizarre and surreal, although ‘Amy’ appears to respond in Welsh at some point, she offers witty and occasionally snarky reactions to the questions, but always extremely researched and well-articulated. The chair then opened up to the audiences for questions they wanted to ask ‘Amy,’ in which an audience member wisely pointed out that ‘Amy’ has almost exclusively referenced male philosophers and writers, implying that AI does not transcend but rather reinforces the biases and prejudices in human society. I was slightly amused by ‘Amy’s’ answer to my question “is marriage the death of love?”, where it responded that marriage merely confirms what is already there or not there.
Wigtown has proven itself to be more than a festival for standard literary conversations, it is open to those seeking a more alternative book festival experience. Robert Twigger’s ‘End of the World Survival Guide’ epitomises the ‘fringe’ aspect that Wigtown also offers, where Twigger, dressed in a camouflage suit, delivers a crash course on the A-Z of apocalypses and coins acronyms in case of emergency such as SHTF (when the shit hits the fan). Performed in a bunker, the show is a wonderful blend between deadpan comedy and surprisingly useful information—which he aims to bring to the 2026 Edinburgh Fringe.
My 10-day journey at the Wigtown Book Festival has exceeded all my expectations, as I got to meet and interact with so many of the authors that make the Scotland literary scene thrive. Wigtown is an amazing town with kind and generous people, often with a shared passion for books, and I cannot wait to visit again sometime soon.
Photo by Petrina Shek