Vivienne Pratfall on the Southbank Centre’s guest curator announcement, literary snobbery, and why the gatekeepers can go and sit quietly in the corner for once
The Southbank Centre announced this week that Dua Lipa, yes, that Dua Lipa, Grammy winner, Brit Award winner, and founder of the Service95 Book Club, will curate this year’s London Literature Festival in October, and I have spent an entire week watching a certain corner of London’s literary establishment quietly lose their minds about it in a way that has been, frankly, more entertaining than most of the actual books they publish.
What The Announcement Actually Involves
Dua Lipa gets to select her favourite established and emerging writers for the festival lineup, bringing her Service95 Book Club, which has genuinely championed some properly excellent, occasionally quite difficult fiction over the past couple of years, directly into the heart of the UK’s longest-running literature festival. This isn’t her first rodeo curating something, but it is, as far as I can tell, the first time a pop star of her specific scale has been handed the actual programming reins for an institution this venerable, and the reaction has been exactly what you’d expect from a certain very online, very online-about-literature demographic.
The Specific Flavour Of Complaint I’ve Been Watching Unfold
You know the type. The tote-bag brigade, the ones who’ve decided that liking a pop star and liking Knausgaard are mutually exclusive personality traits, wringing their hands about “dumbing down” and “celebrity culture infiltrating serious literary spaces,” as though the London Literature Festival hasn’t survived considerably worse curatorial choices over its long, occasionally quite baffling history. I’ve sat through festival panels that felt more like an extended act of self-harm than a literary event, moderated by people who seemed personally offended that the audience wanted to enjoy themselves. I would take Dua Lipa’s actual, demonstrated reading taste over that particular flavour of misery any single time.
Why I Think This Is Actually Exactly What The Festival Needs Right Now
The London Book Fair’s own CEO of Hay Festival Global stood on a stage earlier this year and said, plainly, that the greatest threat to literature isn’t technology, it’s narrowness, narrowness of imagination, narrowness of opportunity, narrowness of the range of voices that actually reach readers. I happen to think that’s exactly right, and I don’t see how you fight narrowness by sneering at anyone who brings a genuinely new audience, a genuinely different set of eyes, into a room that’s historically been rather good at talking to itself. Dua Lipa’s Book Club readers are not, generally speaking, people who were already going to buy a Southbank Centre ticket. Now some meaningful number of them will, and they’ll discover writers they’d never otherwise have encountered, and somehow this is being treated as a crisis rather than the entire actual point of a literature festival existing at all.
What I Personally Loved Most About Her Previous Book Club Selections
I went back through her past picks properly this week, partly out of genuine curiosity and partly, I’ll admit, to arm myself for the inevitable dinner party argument, and found a genuinely well-curated, occasionally quite challenging list, translated fiction sitting comfortably alongside big commercial hits, difficult subject matter handled with more care than several actual professional literary critics I could name have managed in print. This is not, whatever the snobs want to believe, someone picking books based on which cover photographs best against a marble kitchen counter.
The Bit Where I Admit My Own Hypocrisy
I’ll be honest with you, because that’s the whole point of writing this diary rather than a properly composed opinion piece for someone who pays me actual money. My first reaction, buried somewhere genuinely uncomfortable in my own snobbish little heart, was a flicker of exactly the same instinctive scepticism I’m currently mocking everyone else for. I caught myself doing it, the reflexive gatekeeping twitch, before I actually stopped and asked myself why a pop star curating a book festival should bother me more than any of the actual, often deeply undistinguished authors and academics who’ve curated previous years without anyone batting an eyelid.
What This Whole Saga Has Actually Taught Me About My Own Literary Snobbery
Mostly that it’s considerably more deeply embedded than I’d like to admit, and that it took a genuinely good, genuinely well-considered curatorial announcement to properly flush it out into the open where I could look at it directly and feel appropriately embarrassed. I’ll be at that festival in October. I’ll almost certainly enjoy myself more than I have at several of the more self-consciously serious editions I’ve sat through in previous years, and I’ll be doing it while pointedly ignoring anyone still sulking in the corner about how a pop star has somehow ruined literature by getting more people to actually read some.
One Final, Slightly Petty Thought Before I Let This Go
I do genuinely wonder how many of the loudest complainers will quietly turn up anyway, tote bags and all, once the actual programme drops and it turns out to be considerably better curated than half the panels they’ve paid good money for in previous years. I suspect quite a few. I intend to be there watching them shuffle in, pretending they only came for the bookshop, and I intend to enjoy that particular spectacle at least as much as whatever’s actually happening on stage.