Paisley Book Festival, which closed on Sunday evening after a weekend of events under the banner of "Everyday Heroes, Everlasting Icons", has now run for a decade. Tenth-edition festivals are the ones that have to decide whether they are a fixture or a curiosity. On the evidence of the past three days, Paisley is comfortably the first thing, and is starting to look like it could be a regional anchor in the Scottish festival calendar in a way nobody quite predicted when the first edition opened in a single venue in 2017.
The festival theme this year had been criticised in advance for being a little soft, a little Hallmark. In practice it was used to do an interesting thing: the programme deliberately set well-known writers next to people who had no public profile at all, and asked the well-known ones to do the listening. The most striking session of the weekend, in this regard, was an early Saturday-afternoon event in which a panel of Renfrewshire community-pharmacy workers, social-care staff and a retired GP discussed a year on the ground in a primary-care system that has been on the brink for a long time and which has, on every available indicator, got worse rather than better. The professional writers chairing the session knew their job: they shut up.
The headline draw, inevitably, was the appearance of Nicola Sturgeon on Saturday evening to talk about her 27 years as an MSP and the experience of writing about them. The former First Minister has spent the past eighteen months in a strange middle distance from Scottish politics, neither fully retired nor publicly active, and the Paisley event was the first long-form festival conversation she has done since leaving the Scottish Parliament at this month's election. The room was, predictably, sold out. The interesting part was not the politics. It was the careful presentation of an outgoing public figure as a working writer first and a former office-holder second. Whether this transition will hold over a longer book tour is a separate question. For one evening in Paisley it held cleanly.
Less anticipated, and in some ways more rewarding, was the Sunday afternoon event in which Christopher Brookmyre, Doug Johnstone and Val McDermid sat together to mark a combined fifty years of crime publishing. Three Scottish crime writers of different generations and different tempers, talking about the changing publishing industry, the strange afterlife of certain books, the rising production costs at independent presses, the small mercies of regional festivals like this one. It was a conversation that the three could probably have had at the bar afterwards with the same content; the value of having it on stage was that several hundred Renfrewshire readers got to listen in.
The professional writers chairing the session knew their job: they shut up.
The festival's organisers have, over the decade, been careful about one thing in particular: they have not tried to compete with Edinburgh. The Paisley programme leans local in a way that does not feel parochial. Sessions on regional poetry, on the Renfrewshire textile archive, on the social history of the town's high street, sit beside the names you would expect to see in a national-level festival. The model is closer to Wigtown's than to Edinburgh's, but with the urban density of a small post-industrial town rather than the open-country charm of Dumfries and Galloway. It is its own thing, and after ten editions it knows that.
The audience profile has shifted noticeably. Festival staff said, in conversation rather than on the record, that the under-30 attendance had been larger than at any previous edition, and that walk-ups had filled events that in earlier years would have struggled to half-fill. Whether this is the durability of the festival, or a one-off boost from the wider news cycle around the Sturgeon appearance, will take another edition to test. The signs, in the corridors of the OneRen venues across the weekend, were of a settled and growing audience.
If there is a criticism to be made of this year, it is the same criticism that has been made of Paisley in every edition since 2022: the festival's poetry strand is, by a margin, the weakest part of the programme. The 2026 strand was a respectable improvement on last year, but it still does not punch at the weight of the prose programming, and the festival is now large enough that this gap is starting to show. The programmers will know this; the question is whether the budget for next year permits anything to be done about it.
None of which subtracts from the broader point. Scotland's book-festival ecology has been bruised over the past three years. The Edinburgh International Book Festival's complicated relationship with its funding has been the dominant story. The Aye Write controversy in Glasgow ran for the whole of 2024. Wigtown has held steady but small. In that landscape, a tenth-edition Paisley arriving with a confident programme, growing audiences and a clear regional identity is, by any reasonable measure, the most encouraging story in the Scottish book calendar this year.
Brookmyre, asked by an audience member on Sunday afternoon whether crime fiction had become harder or easier to write in the present political moment, replied with the slow shrug of a writer who has been asked the same question for thirty years. The room laughed. The festival closed at 9.07pm with the lights going up on the OneRen main hall. Eleventh editions are easier than tenth ones, generally. Paisley deserves the easier ride next May.
By Eilidh Tait — Culture Editor at The Scottish Review. She has written on Scottish arts and festivals since 2014.