The Scotsman 3 October 2023

The plan had been to make this year’s Scottish International Storytelling Festival a wee bit smaller. The event in 2022, which was Scotland’s Year of Stories, had been so big, with its highest ever number of dates, the organisers felt no need to match it.

But then the applications started coming in. For the 15 slots in the commissioned programme, more than 80 storytellers stepped forward, nearly twice as many as last year. Nor was there a shortage of ideas for the rest of the programme.

“It would have been a shame to cut out 30% or 40% of these great ideas,” says Daniel Abercrombie, associate director of a festival that extends beyond its Edinburgh base to cover the whole of Scotland. “It’s a collaborative festival and as soon as you open the programme to a network of people there is a huge amount out there.” [READ MORE]

By Mark Fisher

MARK FISHER is a freelance theatre critic and feature writer based in Edinburgh and has written about theatre in Scotland since the late-1980s. He is a theatre critic for The Guardian, a former editor of The List magazine and a frequent contributor to the Scotsman and other publications. He is the co-editor of the play anthology Made in Scotland (1995), and the author of The Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide (2012) and How to Write About Theatre (2015) – all Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. He is also the editor of The XTC Bumper Book of Fun for Boys and Girls and What Do You Call That Noise? An XTC Discovery Book (both Mark Fisher Ltd).