Writers and publishing people in the UK have been embroiled in a long and gruelling controversy over the sponsorship of literary festivals. Photo credit: Marsha Arnold– a group founded, as its name suggests, to pressure the publishing industry into more disentangling itself from the fossil fuel industry – broadened its remit to include activism around Israel’s ongoing campaign of slaughter and displacement in Gaza.
But I was, to be honest, a little ambivalent about it. Thanks to many years of Tory austerity, funding for arts events in the UK is increasingly precarious, and book festivals have been having a tough time of it since the pandemic. Whether you see it as pennies from heaven or a deal with the devil, corporate sponsorship is sort of just a fact of life in the arts in the UK.
‘I have been so stressed by this’: Aer Lingus cancellations overshadow couple’s Italian wedding plansThis week is a turning point for Irish gardeners. Here’s why No one was claiming in the first place that art and politics were the same. But the idea that art should somehow be unencumbered by politics is a notion far more prevalent among newspaper columnists than artists themselves