I feel the organisers of this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival have been unfairly maligned for seeking to bring kindness into the cruel and brutal world of literature and publishing. They’ve chosen ‘Repair’ as the core theme and hope to “explore the many things around us which feel broken, and how we might seek to fix them …” Huzzah and not before time, I say.

However, if the Edinburgh book chiefs are being serious about this then may I make some suggestions that will guarantee everyone gets the most out of this year’s event?

All invited authors should be issued with a set of guidelines to ensure no-one in their audience feels left out or traumatised by any unintended literary delinquency. Thus, writers should furnish festival moderators with the extracts from their works that they’ve chosen to read. This means that we can sift through them for any problematic themes or tawdry locutions which might increase anxiety levels.

There would be highly-trained teams of facilitators who have gained certificates from our top universities on how to use redaction in a sensitive, empathetic and empathetically sensitive manner. They found that role-playing and group sharing in their experience of redacting problem texts had enriched the cultural experience of both author and reader.

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