Edinburgh is UNESCO City of Literature since 2004. This speech, given by Mary Paulson-Ellis, was first delivered at a Civic Reception held at the Edinburgh City Chambers on 23 October 2024 to mark 20 years of UNESCO Cities of Literature, as part of the delegates conference 2024. Paulson-Ellis, a Scotland based author, lives in Edinburgh for almost four decades.
Hello. For those who don’t know me (although this being Edinburgh, I do see many friends amongst you) my name is Mary Paulson-Ellis. I am a writer – of fiction short and long, occasionally even non-fiction. In fact a few years ago I wrote an introduction to a new edition of Greyfriar’s Bobby – perhaps the greatest example of the blend of fact and fiction upon which Edinburgh builds its myth. I am also an event chair for some of our outstanding bookshops and festivals in the city, an organiser of one of our many, many literary gatherings, amongst other things. I have also been working with our Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature for the past year or so, both on a novel about our great city, and also the question of what it means to be a writer in a city of literature. And that is what I thought I would speak about tonight.
Welcome
On behalf of Edinburgh, of the writers of Edinburgh, welcome.
We are so glad that you have brought your worlds to our door.
We hope that over these few precious days you have found that door open, the rooms inside enticing, rich with promise and gifts. You can choose whichever gift is right for you – a tartan scarf, perhaps. Or even a fridge magnet adorned with Greyfriar’s Bobby. But for now, here, I offer a small alternative: a story to take home…
Let me tell you a story about being a writer in a city… A writer in a city of literature… About what that means to me.
I am not from Edinburgh, I was not born here. But I am of Edinburgh and have lived in the city for the past 37 years. For more than twenty of those I have pursued my vocation as a writer. I’ve learned my craft here, practiced it, tasted the fruits of success. Such is my fascination with this city, I even use it within my novels as a canvas on which to paint my stories. I feel at home in Edinburgh as a writer, and I am not alone in that. This city is full of writers, alive and dead. They are with us. We are everywhere.
Edinburgh has always been a city of writers – writers of all forms, specialisms, colours and inclinations. It attracts us somehow, has done for hundreds of years, and as a result, on this bedrock, a legacy blooms. In this way Edinburgh has always had a right to call itself a city of literature, and we writers to claim it as such, long before the formal designation which we all share came along. Because without writers, there is no literature. And without literature, no Cities of Literature. We are the fertile ground upon which all the rest grows.
A city is nothing if it is not a city of the imagination. And the cultivation of the imagination, I believe, is perhaps our greatest tool in the forging of a healthy future, for us as individuals but also as a whole. Edinburgh cultivated just such an imagination when it dared to dream about the idea of an official designation – UNESCO City of Literature – twenty years ago. It dared to say: let’s tell a story, and make it a good one… so good it will spread across the world. Now, look, here you are.
For the past 18 months I have been working with Edinburgh City of Literature to tell my own story of the place I call home. I have sat in my eyrie at the top of the John Knox House and imagined the dead who live with us still. Walter Scott and his tartan fundraising; Susan Ferrier disappearing through her small entrance gate in Morningside to write; Robert Louis Stevenson scurrying back and forth from New Town to Old in his velvet jacket; Muriel Spark harbouring her disdain. I think of them standing once where I am standing now – in the heart of Midlothian – asking themselves the same question: what story shall I tell?
But history and culture do not only come from the past. Even the dead were of the moment once. So I have also sat in my eyrie at the top of the John Knox house and observed my city now – the High Street and its methadone dispensary, St Giles Cathedral and illegal street hawkers, the Camera Obscura and heaps of rubbish, the bagpipes, the social housing residents, the Castle on its hill. I have made my way about the city holding conversations with its citizens, from hairdressers to house clearance experts, lawyers to tour guides, asking them about their city, discovering what story they might tell. And as I have wandered about my city, from centre to periphery and back, I have breathed in the fiction of Ian Rankin and Jenni Fagan. I am steeped in the poetry of our Makars, Hannah Lavery and Michael Pedersen. I am thinking of David Greig and Zinnie Harris keeping our stages alive. I am thrilling to the new young breed of experimentalists, Harry Josephine Giles and Camilla Grudova pushing at the boundaries. Of those ‘others’ like Ely Percy, Alycia Pirmohamed and Andrés N. Ordorica saying, we are here too. For just like our dead literary forbears, they are all in the room with us. With you. They are all inside me. Without writers there is no city of literature. We are a city of literature because of them first.
More about the UNESCO City of Literature Edinburgh
Edinburgh is alive with literature. Its small flame burns bright (and some of you who strive to keep that flame alive are here tonight, and I honour and celebrate you, too). Edinburgh is a wonderful place to be a writer because every night and every day, in every bookshop, on every small stage, every moment somewhere, an author is speaking. They are saying: pull up a chair and be with me. They are saying: stand with me for a moment and wonder. They are saying: I am here, will you listen… you city mothers and fathers, you stewards of finance and policy, of salaries and cultural spend… will you hear what the writers have to say, however loudly, however, softly, whatever the quality or substance of our shout or whisper. Will you? They are trying to tell you that they have a gift for you, if you want it. The gift of our graft, our skill, our challenge and foresight. The gift of our beauty and sorrow. The gift of narrating a city, a world, back to itself. All this is yours if you want it. We give it to you freely, for minimal payment. For nothing more than to be properly recognised as the bedrock of a city. Our city. This city of literature. A city famous across the world not just for its architectural beauty, its unique geography, but because it is carved from our efforts, stands tall on our labour. A city birthed through our imagination; that exists in the imagination worldwide because of what we do. In this way the writers of this city of literature – of any city of literature – ask you to understand that such a designation belongs first and foremost, to us.
This summer, in our fair city of literature, has been one of clamour and unrest, of threat and counter threat, of the land of the arts being slowly pulled from beneath the artists feet. It’s palaces and places to gather have been under threat like never before – the International Book Festival, The Filmhouse, Summerhall, the People’s Story, the never to be Literature House. Yet in all my discussions with writers in other cities of literature around the globe, one thing was clear: writers need and want a place to meet and share. This above all else was the common denominator between us. Whether from Bucheon in the east to Seattle in the west, from Melbourne in the south to Tartu in the North, from Prague (and Edinburgh) somewhere in-between, authors of all distinctions – poets, short story writers, graphic novelists, fictionalists – need somewhere to meet and talk and share and exclaim – with other writers, with readers, with anyone who wants to join in. They want somewhere accessible and central, somewhere convivial and warm in which to exercise the imaginative capacity on which a city thrives. They want somewhere to break bread together in a manner that does not exploit their already meagre pockets. A place that is theirs, to which they can belong. They want somewhere to call home.
“Whether from Bucheon in the east to Seattle in the west, from Melbourne in the south to Tartu in the North, from Prague (and Edinburgh) somewhere in-between, authors of all distinctions – poets, short story writers, graphic novelists, fictionalists – need somewhere to meet and talk and share and exclaim – with other writers, with readers, with anyone who wants to join in."
So, to all those who have dared to dream as Edinburgh did twenty years ago, I say this about your city of literature. Do not impoverish the writer. Do not force them in lieu of the seductive lure of the tourist dollar, the honeyed chequebook of the property developer, the slow creep of gentrification, from their meeting places, their cafes, their studios, their homes. Make sure they have their space within your city of literature, and not just on the periphery, but at the heart of your city, as I am standing at the heart of Midlothian now.
And beware, too, the city that abandons its writers while shouting their names from the rooftop, particularly the dead ones, wearing them like a badge of honour, proclaiming their greatness. Beware. It isn’t difficult to celebrate what is behind you, to rely on it for income and interest. It takes a lot more courage to ensure you are providing fertile soil for whatever might come next. For without the writers of today and tomorrow, your city will become a hollow thing. A thing that exists only in a photograph on instagram. An emperor wearing new clothes.
Somewhere in Edinburgh tonight is a Susan Ferrier, a Muriel Spark, an Robert Louis Stevenson watching from his high window, from her high window, from their high window (as I have been watching from mine these past 18 months), wondering if they can do it. If they can imagine their city into words. They are wondering if they dare to dream. Or, whether they might fair better in another city altogether: somewhere in which their toehold might become a foothold; in which their foothold might become a patch of solid ground. Somewhere that offers not just platitudes, but money and opportunity, respect and dignity, a place in which to thrive. Will your city of literature be such a place for them?
I’m going to finish soon, but there is one more thing I want to say about being a writer in a city of literature before I end.
As well as being a place to gather, to dream, to lay down a legacy, to imagine, to narrate a city back to itself, to have fun, I have met people – writers – this summer who understand (and utilise) their city of literature, its small but significant footprint in the places where they reside, as something even more special and profound. They have understood it as a place of safety.
A space in which to harbour those fleeing from persecution. As a platform from which to declare that Black Lives Matter. As an opportunity to showcase that which might otherwise be banned. I have met writers who grew up behind what we used to call the Iron Curtain, who understood then, and understand now, that literature, and all art, is not just a safe space, a place of sanctuary, but a vehicle for liberation, for community and self expression, who see a designation such as the one we are all lucky enough to share and celebrate here tonight as a symbol, perhaps even a guarantee, of that simple yet oft contested idea - freedom. They understand that their city of literature is not just a necessary cauldron of ideas and innovation, a space in which the old can be honoured and the young can tear all that up in favour of the new, but also as place in which to heal.
Scottish journalist, Jen Stout, in her new book, Night Train to Odesa (also a city of literature), published incidentally by Polygon, a stalwart of the Edinburgh publishing scene, writes about visiting the Kharkiv Literary Museum in 2022 at the height of the war in Ukraine. Why visit a literary museum at the height of a war when you could be reporting from a battlefield?
She went to see the pages of a notebook recently dug from beneath a cherry tree in a village not too far from that city. In that notebook was an account of occupation, written by a well known Ukrainian patriot, poet and children’s author, Volodymyr Vakulenko. He had disappeared. But his words had been dug up – saved – by a younger Ukrainian writer, Victoria Amelina, who insisted that his story would continue, whatever might have happened to him.
Both of these writers are now dead, killed in a war of aggression, a war that wants to wipe out and destroy, not just people but culture, literature, the very idea of a city of literature. Stout wanders around the museum with its director Tetyana, who waves a hand at it all – Kharkiv’s literary heritage, some of it ancient, but some of it, like Vakulenko’s notebook, brand new – and gives the answer to why cities of literature matter when she says, ‘literature, and the history of all this, holds the answer to the big question, “Why?”’
Vakulenko and Amelina are no longer with us. Scott and Spark are long gone. But somewhere in your city of literature, in mine, now and in the future, a writer is reading their words and saying, let me dream as big as they once did, as you once did, of the story I might tell. They are saying, let me be the fertile ground on which you can make yourself a garden. Let me be your city of literature, as you are mine, the place we can all call home.
Thank you.
© Mary Paulson-Ellis, 2024
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