When I close my eyes I can see Charlotte Square Gardens bedecked and tented for the Edinburgh International Book festival, and I always feel a thrill. I am still in awe of the Edinburgh Book festival, even after all these years, because without losing any of its intimacy, without seeming too commercial or, I might say, "over organised" it has grown and grown and is the biggest, best-known celebration of books in the world, and yet it still fits within the wrought iron fencing. It must be the only book festival in a Unesco world heritage site, and one can imagine the elegant restrained Robert Adam facades enjoying the colourful bohemian air that attends the city square in August.
When you step off the pavement and into the marquee at the entrance, you enter a magical space, with an ecology all of its own. The best thing is, you are welcome whether you've paid to go to an event, or you simply want to take in the atmosphere, have a coffee or a picnic on the grass, or recline in a canvas deckchair decorated with a literary quote, or sip slightly indifferent wine and buy a book.
This year, as you wander around, you might fall into step with Margaret Drabble, or Willie McIlvanney or Denise Mina or Haruki Murakami, just as in previous years Donna Tartt, or Thomas Keneally, or Bill Clinton or Toni Morrison. Or the late and much loved figures of Seamus Heaney, or Maya Angelou, or Iain Banks might have emerged blinking into the light from the authors' yurt to take questions from eager readers. The atmosphere, rather than promoting the cult of celebrity, is always warm and inviting and democratic. The passion for books is palpable, and the life of the mind celebrated whether fiction or cookbooks, poetry, biography or science, or politics, or philosophy or architecture or history – and always an air of anticipation, especially this year when the referendum on Scottish independence will be just a month away, and the festival an arena for debate just as it was last year.
I think it's a sign of a truly wonderful festival when such love and attention has been spent on the events for young people, even babies – everything from a session on dealing with teenage stress to magic and joke telling.
When the festival became an annual event in 1997, there were just 30 authors taking part. Now there are more than 800 writers coming to Edinburgh to events attracting almost a quarter of a million people. Isn't that a wondrous thing? And the festival keeps evolving in most imaginative ways. This year, the Book festival has hooked up with the theatre company Grid Iron to create Letters Home, a promenade theatre production in and around Charlotte Square Gardens with pieces written by four writers: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Kei Miller, Kamila Shamsie and Christos Tsiolkas. And also this year, the second biennial Edwin Morgan Poetry award worth roughly £20,000 will be made to a Scottish poet under the age of 30, just because Edwin Morgan well remembered the problems young poets can have in getting their first collection published. The older I get, the more I love poetry and to listen to it spoken aloud. So it will be thrilling and moving to hear the poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy read a selection of new work, some of it reflecting on the tragedy of the first world war.
The late, great Edwin Morgan appeared at the Edinburgh Book festival on more than one occasion, and it is he who wrote some of the best lines about reading, "A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man's mind can get both provocation and privacy."
Please come to Charlotte Square Gardens to be entertained and stimulated and to mingle with the thousands of other people who treasure books as much as you do.
