Throughout history, writers have received patronage from richer, more powerful members of their societies. They have also tested the limits of this patronage: Shakespeare, a member of the King’s Men, an acting company that had exclusive control over its productions, wisely set all his plays involving regicide outside England or in the distant past; Jane Austen likewise refused the Prince Regent’s request that she make a prince the subject of her next book, although she did dedicate that novel to him (it was Emma, the story of an infirm patriarch who leaves his daughter in charge). Patronage is an agreement to which unequal positions of power are inherent, and it always comes with risks and conditions for the recipient.
In the 2000s, ticket sales, sponsors, and local government and Arts Council grants kept literary festivals afloat. This was not a bad situation. Unlike the patronage of philanthropists or kings, these were relatively accountable sources of cash — typically, programmes answer to audiences, governments answer to voters, and diverse funders prevent any single corporate sponsor from wielding too much power.
Then, in 2010, the newly elected Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government began a programme of austerity that transformed British society, posing an existential threat to public services, and festival management teams were forced to find alternative sources of income. (I know how hard this must have been: between 2016 and 2021, I was a trustee of a small domestic violence refuge run for and by Latin American women, and cuts left usfaced with closure and desperate for new funders.)
This is where Baillie Gifford comes in. During the post-2010 austerity years, the Scottish asset manager, known for donating to the arts, became a significant funder of the UK literary festival scene. The company picked up Wigtown, Stratford, Borders, Hay, and Wimbledon (if not others — the sponsorship start dates aren’t publicly available), creating a cross-sector reliance on its sponsorship. In Scotland, Baillie Gifford’s relationships with arts institutions continue to run especially deep. The firm has sponsored the Edinburgh International Book Festival (EIBF) since 2004 and the Scottish National Ballet since 1988. Individuals associated with the institution have also reportedly made significant personal donations: a partner at Baillie Gifford currently sits on the boards of Fruitmarket and the National Galleries of Scotland’s independent fundraising body, the NGS Foundation.
The Power of Asset Managers
But what exactly was the cultural sector getting into bed with? Asset managers have existed in some form or other for over a century. However, Professor Brett Christophers, author of Our Lives in their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World, identifies the period between the 1980s and 2020 as one of significant growth for asset managers, when the amount of wealth they managed (their ‘assets under management’, or ‘AUM’) increased one thousand-fold from around $100 billion to $100 trillion. According to Christophers, a significant amount of this growth occurred in the six years following the 2008 crash, when banks were subjected to new and more stringent regulations, but asset managers much less so. In 2014, the Bank of England’s Chief Economist, Andrew Haldane, predicted the coming of ‘the age of asset management’.
Baillie Gifford’s ‘AUM’ consists mainly of financial products (that is, stocks and bonds); however, in the 2010s, many other asset managers expanded into ‘real’ assets, such as housing and utilities. This gave them control over unexpected areas of everyday life without the knowledge or consent of the people those assets affected, creating what Christophers dubs the ‘asset manager society’. Although Baillie Gifford does not own shares in cultural organisations, the creeping dominance the firm has established over the cultural sector through sponsorship, particularly in Scotland, resembles Christophers’ ‘asset manager society’.
It is unclear whether literary festivals sought advice from outside organisations regarding the ethics of this sponsorship. Indeed, with all the will in the world, a comprehensive review of an asset manager’s investments by a third party is not possible. As a result, when trustees and management teams accepted sponsorship from Baillie Gifford, they made their institution reliant on money generated from sources they were unable to scrutinise. As a matter of principle, this should have caused concern.
During this period, both EIBF and Hay expanded. Between 2005 and 2023, Hay went from holding a single annual festival in Wales to running events in 30 locations worldwide. EIBF’s growth was more modest, with its total income increasing from nearly £800,000 (or £1.7 million, adjusted for inflation) in 2004 to £4.2 million in 2022. A senior member of festival management said to me in a private conversation, ‘We developed a US-style corporate funding model, one which authors did not really consent to.’
Taking Action
Then, things changed: journalists, NGOs and activist groups released new research on Baillie Gifford’s investments in fossil fuels and companies complicit in Israeli apartheid, occupation, and genocide — and based on this research, authors and artists took action.
In July 2023, investigative Scottish outlet The Ferret reported that the firm had investments worth £5 billion in the fossil fuel industry (for a sense of scale, the University of Cambridge’s entire endowment is £3.5 billion). A week later, Greta Thunberg pulled out of her appearance at EIBF. After that, four writers that were scheduled to appear at the festival — me, Booker-longlisted Guy Gunaratne, climate writer Mikaela Loach, and Edinburgh-based writer and bookseller Jessica Gaitán Johannesson – wrote an open letter calling on Baillie Gifford to divest from the fossil fuel industry, and if they didn’t, for EIBF to drop them. Fifty authors signed, including Gary Younge, Zadie Smith, and Ali Smith. A few days later, Loach, Gaitán Johannesson and Edinburgh-based novelist Mohamed Tonsy led an audience walkout from Loach’s event at the start of EIBF; throughout the festival, authors read statements in support of the letter.
Nick Barley, formerly the director of EIBF, responded with a conciliatory statement. His speech began, ‘Dear Authors’, and read:
Writers are the lifeblood of this festival. We exist to offer you and your readers the chance of open discussion about the things that matter to you… I am keen to learn from you about this, to hear your expertise, to understand your perspective. I promise to consider what you say carefully, and keep an open mind about how to proceed.
He claimed that he had ‘looked very closely at the work of Baillie Gifford’, and that investments in a ‘Danish wind farm’ keeping two power stations open due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine were ‘the only reason’ two percent of Baillie Gifford’s funds were in fossil fuels. Yet, when we checked this against the quarterly fund reports available on Baillie Gifford’s website, the firm mentioned holdings in the Chinese National Offshore Oil Corporation, a stakeholder in the notorious East African Crude Oil Pipeline, and Petrobras, a Brazilian oil corporation seeking to drill in the Amazon basin.
Nevertheless, multiple right-wing hit pieces were published targeting Loach, a young Black woman, taking Barley at his word. The result was that some writers, in particular writers of colour, were met with hostility from EIBF audiences (who tend to be disproportionately white and middle class due to high ticket prices) when reading the open letter at their events. Midway through the festival, Gaitán Johannesson and I met with EIBF management, including incoming EIBF director Jenny Niven, in a tense yet civil meeting.
In October 2023, authors speaking at Cheltenham released a similar statement, and we chose this moment to launch Fossil Free Books (FFB). We did this in part to protect authors from harassment, especially authors of colour. The Ferret published an investigation four months later that exposed Baillie Gifford’s £670 million investment in Petrobras, a company aiming to drill in the Amazon Basin.
Investing in Genocide
The genocidal actions of the Israeli state following the 7th October attacks also transformed the level of interest from NGOs and activists in institutions financing the corporations involved in Israeli occupation, apartheid and genocide. Since 2016, the UN has kept a database of companies profiting from the ongoing colonisation and occupation in the West Bank. In November 2023, Arts Workers for Palestine Scotland (AWPS) called on Baillie Gifford to divest its holdings in three companies on the list, as well as big technology firms providing services to the Israeli military. In December 2023, a coalition of 25 civil society groups released a report identifying the top 50 European investors in companies on the UN database, including Baillie Gifford, whose holdings were calculated at just over $1 billion. (Baillie Gifford did not, and does not, deny these investments.)
AWPS also called on Baillie Gifford to divest from Amazon and Nvidia, which provide nearly £10 billion worth of services to the Israeli government. In 2022, Amazon and Alphabet (Google’s parent company) signed a $1.2 billion contract, known as Project Nimbus, to provide cloud computing and AI services to the Israeli government and military: Israel is using AI programmes in its assault on Gaza to identify ‘targets’ in their homes, where they have been bombed alongside their families.
AWPS were not the only workers with concerns about Project Nimbus. No Tech in Apartheid, a US-based group formed by technology workers and endorsed by Jewish Voice for Peace, has been protesting Amazon and Alphabet since the contract for Project Nimbus was signed. They organised an open letter calling for the companies to ‘stop powering the genocide of Palestinians’ and led a sit-in at Google’s New York offices.
At the end of May 2024, Scottish broadsheet The Herald revealed that data obtained by FFB showed that Baillie Gifford held investments worth over £60 million in Babcock International, an arms company ‘significantly involved in arming Israel’, according to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. The relevant Baillie Gifford fund report for Q1 2024, available on the firm’s website, describes the increase in value in Babcock stock for that period, which demonstrates that Baillie Gifford has profited from war. Friends of the Earth Scotland, People and Planet, and Caroline Lucas all condemned the investment.
Significantly, when AWPS, FFB and others called for Baillie Gifford to divest, we were joining the longstanding call from Palestinians for divestment. The Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement was established 19 years ago by Palestinian civil society groups and modelled on the global movement to abolish apartheid in South Africa. Its founding rationale was that where governments fail to issue economic and cultural sanctions, citizens must step up.
Our call for divestment had precedent. In late February 2022, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Scottish Parliament called on Baillie Gifford to divest the Scottish Parliamentary Pension Fund, which it managed, from all Russian companies. Just over a week later, Baillie Gifford confirmed the divestment was all but complete.
If the UK government had imposed economic sanctions on Israel, called for divestment from companies operating in illegal Israeli settlements on the UN database, and banned arms sales to Israel — just as it had for Russia following the invasion of Ukraine — the Palestine-related side of our campaign wouldn’t have been necessary.
As the examples of South Africa and Russia show, divestment campaigns are neither new nor unreasonable. When the world changes and new information emerges, so do norms, institutions and their investments — and more quickly than we might think. In April this year, the student encampment at Columbia University called for divestment from Alphabet and Amazon. By June, the University of Edinburgh announced that it would suspend new investments in Alphabet and Amazon in response to calls from students and staff.
Baillie Gifford’s Defence
The first and most frequently cited argument made by Baillie Gifford is that only two percent of its investments are in companies profiting from fossil fuels, compared to an industry average of 11 percent. This should make it all the easier to divest completely. In fact, since FFB started calling for divestment, the firm has sold some of its smaller fossil fuel holdings. According to research published in July 2024, Baillie Gifford has quietly sold its shares in the Chinese National Offshore Oil Corporation, a company highlighted by FFB’s 2023 campaign as a minority stakeholder in the East African Crude Oil Pipeline.
Baillie Gifford has also frequently referred to its fiduciary duty, arguing that it cannot make investment decisions based on ‘subjective’ factors such as ethics. However, the extent and meaning of fiduciary duty have been highly contested in academic and legal circles for over 20 years. In 2005, Freshfields law firm released a landmark report that stated that investors should consider environmental factors. Their argument was not moral but financial — harming the planet would harm investments.
As BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said in 2022:
We focus on sustainability not because we are environmentalists, but because we are capitalists and fiduciaries to our clients.
The proportion of Baillie Gifford’s AUM in fossil fuels compared to other investments suggests that the firm does broadly espouse this investment philosophy. What then was so offensive about FFB’s divestment demands? It appears to be three things: the suggestion that communities in the Global South, rather than investors, should set the acceptable pace of divestment; an unwillingness to be seen to be influenced by activists; and an injury to ego caused by authors refusing to bend the knee. The argument has also been made that equity in fossil fuel companies is better off owned by Baillie Gifford so the firm can vote for green policies at company AGMs (known as ‘shareholder activism’). However, according to NGO Reclaim Finance, Baillie Gifford’s voting record on green issues is very poor.
As for their Israel-related investments, Baillie Gifford did not dispute its holdings in companies on the UN database, although it claimed that one company, Cemex, ‘ceased all operations in the Occupied Palestinian Territories during 2023’. This does not bear scrutiny. Cemex did sell two of its factories on occupied land in 2021 (largely due to the BDS movement); however, reports show that Cemex still operates in illegal settlements.
Later, Baillie Gifford would add that it was ‘unreasonable’ to call for divestment from tech giants, comparing it to demanding authors boycott Amazon. Others have suggested that authors turn their attention to fossil fuel investor Elliott, the majority shareholder of Waterstones and Barnes and Noble. However, investor relationships are structurally different to those of authors. Amazon holds a near monopoly on online books in the UK and beyond, while Waterstones, which acquired Daunt and Blackwells, retains an in-person enterprise. Authors are structurally prevented from selling books at any scale without using these companies. Investors face no such structural barriers because Amazon and Waterstones do not hold a monopoly on the companies they can invest in — fund managers are free to choose from pretty much any company they believe will bring their clients returns.
All in all, Baillie Gifford’s defence amounts to a matter of interpretation, not information. For the management firm, the morality of its investments is relative to the investments of its competitors. However, the climate and BDS movement are not interested in relative morality. We’re not interested in congratulating Baillie Gifford for profiting less from human rights abuses than other asset managers, which is to say, some of the most harmful companies in the world. We are interested in stopping human rights abuses as urgently as possible. And, as governments refuse to intervene, investments worth billions become very significant indeed.
Fossil Free Books
On 15th May 2024, FFB released a statement signed by 200 authors and other book workers calling on Baillie Gifford to divest from the fossil fuel industry and companies involved in Israeli occupation, apartheid and genocide. Three days later, the letter had over 800 signatories. They were public and included George Monbiot, Sally Rooney, Naomi Klein, and Greta Thunberg. They also included booksellers working at these festivals and authors with experience organising festivals, including the Palestine Festival of Literature. Many of these writers had personal relationships with trustees and senior management of the festivals sponsored by Baillie Gifford.
FFB organisers also contacted authors scheduled to appear at Baillie Gifford-sponsored festivals, sharing information about the firm’s investments and recommending that authors either withdraw or use their appearance to call for divestment. For authors opting to appear at Hay that month, we recommended starting their events with a poem by a Palestinian author, providing a list of suggestions.
Our statement soon caught the attention of the online, Scotland-based contingent of the ‘gender critical’ movement. This was bizarre as our statement made no mention of gender. These accounts began accusing us of anonymity, replying to all our posts, insisting we reveal who our ‘leaders’ and ‘funders’ were. This was equally as bizarre: we had no funders, our website stated we were a collective, our social media accounts showed the names and faces of several authors involved with FFB, and the list of signatories was public. These accounts began abusing women of colour and trans women associated with FFB on X. Within days, an anonymous account called us ‘domestic terrorists’.
During this time, the FFB press working group — made up of seven authors, including me, with experience working in and with the media — wrote thoughtful replies to all requests for comment, gave broadcast and print interviews, and held spokesperson training so that members of FFB could speak to the press. Our social media working group, which is a similar size, created a short video compilation of twenty or so FFB members talking to the camera, demonstrating again that we were a diverse, friendly collective of authors and book workers, and not ‘anonymous activists’. Tribune’s staff writer Grace Blakely, author of the bestseller Vulture Capitalism, pitched an opinion piece delving into the decades-old academic debate around fiduciary duty to several papers, but none were interested.
Soon, other writers spoke out. Max Porter said FFB were ‘calm, informed and courteous’, and Noreen Masud and Olivia Sudjic shared extracts from the emails they received from FFB organisers. When the Guardian searched for examples of intimidation by FFB, all they found was an offer from Hay locals to attend events of authors calling for divestment, and the claim, from an author not contacted by FFB, that ‘if you aren’t seen to be publicly supporting the protests, you are made to feel like a bad person.’
Hay’s Defence
On the 24th May, Hay released a short statement announcing that it was suspending its sponsorship with Baillie Gifford, ‘in light of claims raised by campaigners and intense pressure on artists to withdraw’. Six days later, EIBF released a longer, more emotive statement.
The opening paragraph announces the end of the relationship with Baillie Gifford:
The board and management of EIBF believe their ability to deliver an event this August that is safe … for audiences, authors and staff has been severely compromised, following the withdrawal of several authors and threats of disruption from activists [my italics throughout].
Jenny Niven, the Director, is quoted as saying:
[t]he pressure on our team has simply become intolerable… we need to focus … on delivering a safe and successful event.
She then defends Baillie Gifford’s investments.
The board’s chair, Allan Little, adds:
Funding for the arts is now in a perilous position …the future of festivals … is in jeopardy…[o]ur festival should be a place where progressive and nuanced discussion can happen in a safe and respectful space… [w]e have made several invitations to Fossil Free Books, and other groups, to attend this year’s festival and regret that they have not responded to those offers.
Nick Thomas, partner at Baillie Gifford, concluded:
The activists’ anonymous campaign of coercion and misinformation has put intolerable pressure on authors and the festival community…. We hold the activists squarely responsible for the inhibiting effect their action will have on funding for the arts in this country.
My Honest Account
This statement makes several untrue claims. Not only was FFB in contact with EIBF, but we had a meeting booked with festival management the very next day. The much more serious, untrue claim was that we were ‘anonymous activists’. Seeing this shared by the festival’s official channels astonished us. Many of our members had personal relationships with its management (some going back decades); they had met with us, been in correspondence with us, and knew the identities of all the authors who had withdrawn. Members of FFB were even known to Thomas, with whom FFB had corresponded and planned to meet.
Their language (‘safe’, ‘threat’, ‘disruption’, ‘perilous’, ‘jeopardy’) suggested that we — their authors — were a danger to them and, somehow, ourselves. The only actions FFB organised were the poetry readings at Hay and the walkout from Loach’s event in 2023, which were peaceful and safe. (When we did meet with EIBF and Hay, they shared no examples of threats or violence with us. If they had, we would have collaborated with them to de-escalate, however possible.)
I want to tell you an honest account of what happened. When made aware of Baillie Gifford’s investments, many authors programmed by EIBF and Hay no longer wanted to appear at those festivals. These late-stage withdrawals threatened ticket sales, making programming, funding and delivering the festivals very difficult. Admittedly, this caused ‘intolerable pressure’ on festival staff and led management teams to drop Baillie Gifford. But it was not a mysterious phenomenon that required subterfuge and intimidation. The withdrawal of labour at key moments is a legitimate, age-old organising technique used by workers to bring intransigent bosses to the table; it has been practised for decades by trade unionists, from miners to junior doctors to screenwriters.
Perhaps festivals forgot that authors were the labour force they relied on to deliver their festivals, and authors had not chosen Baillie Gifford as their patron. Of course, many had no issue with the company’s investments, while others were unwilling to take a stand. Thankfully, however, enough of us were willing. What EIBF and Hay did not consider — and what they must reckon with going forward — is that the authors they programme to create progressive, informed and timely discussions on global affairs are likely to be engaged in the BDS and other solidarity movements — and willing to make small sacrifices to stop the financing of genocide and human rights violations.
The rhetorical shift from Barley’s statement in August 2023 to EIBF’s statement in May 2024 was remarkable. In just nine months, we had gone from ‘the lifeblood of the festival’ to ‘anonymous activists’ entirely separate from proceedings. I found the language used by EIBF and Hay fascinating, a feeling shared by the many bookish folk in FFB. This new rhetoric employs a kind of doublespeak, one which enables the transformation of the author into the opposite: the book burner. It takes deliberate acts of conscience and turns them on their head, attributing them to ‘coercion’.
According to the logic of this doublespeak, when the writer signs their full name on an open letter, they are ‘anonymous’ and their political opinion, worthy of discussion on stage, is labelled as ‘misinformation’. Only in the language of doublespeak is it possible to claim that, to protect freedom of speech and progressive intellectual thought, the writers leading that progressive thought must be condemned, and all serious engagement with their ideas rejected. This doublespeak obscures the writer’s role as a political agent and public intellectual. It is a sleight of hand that allowed EIBF to side with Baillie Gifford against its writers, against even the stated purpose of literary festivals.
The most egregious and harmful function of this doublespeak is to distract from the reason authors were taking action in the first place: Baillie Gifford’s complicity in the ongoing genocide of Palestinians and the climate crisis. EIBF used the language of violence (‘jeopardy’, ‘perilous’, ‘threats’, ‘disruption’), authors reading poems and withdrawing their labour, as well as the prospect of losing funding. More recently, Julie Finch, director of Hay Festival, compared her situation in May to ‘an armed robbery’. The era-defining violence at the heart of the matter — Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, its obliteration of Gaza’s universities and libraries, and the murder of Palestinian poets, journalists and writers and a generation of children — and Baillie Gifford’s financial ties to that violence, was thus obscured.
Baillie Gifford’s distortion is unsurprising. However, the behaviour of EIBF — and to a lesser extent, Hay — is shocking. It is Christophers’ ‘asset manager society’ in action. In EIBF’s May 2024 statement, we see an institution operating for the benefit of an asset manager to the detriment of its stated purpose, without the consent of workers or the people using the services of that institution.
On 5th June 2024 — 21 days after we released our statement — Baillie Gifford cut ties with the UK literary festivals it still sponsored, including the five smallest festivals on its original roster. The firm, it turned out, was a flighty, petulant patron; rather than tolerate criticism or engage on the question of divesting in line with its stated values, it chose to pull funding at once, and with no transition plan.
In just over a week, over 50 articles were published about FFB. They did not question the doublespeak of EIBF’s false claims, but instead, embraced and elaborated on its clickbait promise. We were infantile — ‘childish’ (The Economist and the Evening Standard), ‘childish activists’, and ‘pretentious kids’ (The Scotsman) — as well as dangerous — a ‘mob’ (The Spectator and New Statesman), a ‘lunatic fringe’ (The Scotsman), ‘climate fanatics’ (The Telegraph and Daily Mail), ‘eco zealots’ (Scottish Daily Mail). We were ‘bullying’ writers and publishers (The Times, The Telegraph), and seeking to ‘police art’ (New Statesman). A cartoon about us burning books was published in The Spectator, and a former Guardian journalist falsely claimed FFB was founded on 7th October 2023.
On 7th June, the Daily Mail published a photograph of me and two non-white FFB members — including Loach, although she had not been a FFB spokesperson in 2024 — and accused FFB of anonymity. That Sunday, the 10th of June, The Times published a long read claiming that FFB’s campaign had made the presence of armed police necessary at Hay, and that we had informed authors that ‘protestors would be attending the festival’. As mentioned above, we had let writers making statements know that local Hay residents would attend their events for support; nowhere did we state that authors not making statements would be protested. When Hay’s management team eventually met with FFB, they did not share any examples of threats, expressing a fear of violence based on the attack on Salman Rushdie following the fatwa issued by the Ayatollah of Iran in 1989 — a violent movement indeed, but one quite distinct from FFB.
The same day The Sunday Times ran its story, The Herald published news that Baillie Gifford held investments worth over £60 million in Babcock International, an arms company supplying Israel. Baillie Gifford had been well aware of these investments throughout. While the value of these investments was obtained from a specialist Bloomberg terminal, quarterly reports mentioning Babcock were available on Baillie Gifford’s website for any journalist or festival manager to see.
That week, we were keen to reliably verify the data we had regarding Baillie Gifford’s investments in Babcock, and wanted this new information to be shared with the public, particularly in Scotland. Naively, we felt sure that when the public could see the direct link between Israel’s genocide of Palestinians and Baillie Gifford, the tenor of the discussion in the media and in literary circles would change.
The pressure of getting the story to the press in the face of relentless attacks and misinformation in the national media was overwhelming. I had to be taken to A&E due to an acute mental health crisis; it was an incredibly wretched experience. While I was still deeply unwell, I felt tempted to righteously echo Baillie Gifford’s rhetoric on social media and announce that I held the firm and EIBF responsible for my mental health crisis. Yet doing so would have been a truculent oversimplification, just like their statement. Their rhetoric and false claims certainly did contribute to the chain of events that sent me to the hospital, but so did my inability to step back and look after myself, as many friends in FFB and my partner had urged me to do.
I’m not interested in using rhetoric to punish festival management for what happened to me, or further polarising the situation. My desire now is for honesty. I never thought literary festivals would share false claims about writers at the behest of a private company, or vilify us for peacefully expressing political opinions and withdrawing our labour. I hope it never happens again.
Austerity Still Hurts
During the austerity decade, ten UK literary festivals shifted from diverse funding sources to reliance on fewer funding sources, including Baillie Gifford, an asset manager they were unable and unwilling to scrutinise. This fundraising strategy came with risks and, eventually, a cost. On the 30th May 2024, after a month of crisis, intense stress and pressure, EIBF published a statement containing claims about authors that it knew were untrue, and the festival was eating itself. In that moment, EIBF chose not to tell the truth, but to act as a mouthpiece for Baillie Gifford, causing harm to its community, and shutting down the progressive intellectual thought the festival existed to promote, even though the money from Baillie Gifford was gone.
Austerity left public services in jeopardy between 2010 and 2020. Many life-saving institutions did not survive. As a trustee of a women’s refuge, I saw how this caused severe and long-lasting trauma to institutions and individuals, resulting in an understandable feeling of victimisation and a ruthless dedication to institutional survival by any means necessary. Ten years after the introduction of austerity, women’s sector management teams and boards defended low pay and poor working conditions, and resisted attempts by refuge workers to unionise. They did this knowing that financial precarity is one of the main risk factors for domestic violence, the very thing these organisations exist to prevent.
The injuries of austerity caused the women’s sector to eat itself, engaging in its own form of doublespeak: that to protect women, it must harm women. For literary festivals (as for the women’s sector, in different ways), these injuries were only deepened by the COVID-19 pandemic, which posed a second existential threat to festivals, destroying their other source of income — ticket sales. By 2023 and 2024, festival management teams and boards had survived not two crises but one.
I say this because it is necessary to acknowledge the very real harm caused to festival managers, staff and board members by austerity, so that we can understand how we got to where we are and move on. None of us wanted austerity — not authors, not festival management teams or boards — and all of us have been hurt by it. It has hurt our ability to earn a living, to provide for our loved ones, and it has hurt our relationships with one another. It has made it harder to write, and it has made it harder to run literary festivals.
Although many articles have lamented the loss of Baillie Gifford’s sponsorship, few were specific about its value. When TheTimes published that Baillie Gifford had given Hay £130,000, Wigtown £35,000 and Stratford £25,000 a year — and all ten festivals a total of approximately £1,000,000 a year — FFB was surprised. This is not a huge amount of money in publishing. In 2023, the industry reported revenues of over £7 billion, an increase of three percent on 2022, and its highest-ever figure.
The zenith of the media mania was arguably when Marina Hyde called us ‘wreckers’ on The Rest Is Entertainment, one of the UK’s most popular podcasts. Had she asked her co-host, Richard Osman, the size of his last advance, they might have had a more instructive conversation. Osman was paid £10 million for four novels. A tenth of Osman’s advance would replace Baillie Gifford’s sponsorship of Stratford for the next forty years; the whole advance would replace its sponsorship of all ten festivals for a decade.
Advances like Osman’s are exceptional. Median UK author earnings from writing were £7,000 in 2022, a real-terms pay cut of more than half from 2006, with the best-paid ten percent of authors earning about half of all author income. The average starting salary for publishing staff is £20,000, a real-terms pay cut of around a third compared to 2017. Publishing is not a cash-strapped industry; it’s an industry where resources are unevenly distributed.
Two weeks after Baillie Gifford pulled its funding from its remaining UK literary festivals, a FFB Bloomsbury staff member wrote to its senior management, urging the publisher to donate to the festivals abandoned by the asset manager. Two months later, the ten former-Baillie Gifford festivals proudly announced that they had received £100,000 from Bloomsbury. In doing so, they were — unbeknownst to themselves — celebrating the power of collaboration between FFB and festival management, and showcasing the benefit of a fairer redistribution of resources within the industry.
The arts deserve public funding for myriad reasons — they benefit local economies, educate us, and make life more enjoyable. Writers and book workers benefit from well-funded public services, whether in the form of housing benefits, libraries, or grants for literary festivals. FFB offered to make a joint call with EIBF for public funding, arguing in 2024 that the imminent general election provided a unique opportunity to make that case, but our offer was not taken up.
In January 2025, Creative Scotland announced multi-year funding for cultural organisations across Scotland. EIBF is to receive £1,880,000 over the next three years — about twice as much as it would have got from Baillie Gifford during that period — and Wigtown Book Festival will receive £388,900, about three times as much as it would have got from Baillie Gifford. In February 2025, while scolding authors for criticising corporate sponsors, Lisa Nandy announced an extra £270m for the cultural sector. It is the very thing festival managers insisted was impossible and refused to campaign for: after fifteen years of austerity, government funding for festivals and the arts is being reinstated.
Still, literary institutions must not bury their heads in the sand; it will not work. Baillie Gifford still sponsors one literary event: the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction, known as the Baillie Gifford Prize. At the awards ceremony on 19 November 2024, winner Richard Flanagan stated in a pre-recorded video that he would delay his acceptance of the £50,000 prize until Baillie Gifford releases a plan to divest from fossil fuels and increase their investments in renewables. (FFB had never had any contact with Richard Flanagan and was entirely surprised by his announcement.) Shortly afterwards, Viet Thanh Nguyen announced online that he would be donating his £5,000 award for being shortlisted for the prize to We Are Not Numbers, a charity supporting Palestinian writers.
Workers Can Win
It may be tempting for festivals to position themselves in opposition to FFB to curry favour with corporations and individuals keen to be seen as patrons of the arts but wary of scrutiny by artists. However, in the longer term, the interests of publishing staff, authors and festivals are aligned — we all stand to benefit from more public funding, the fairer distribution of profits across the publishing industry, and independence from private corporations seeking to hamper what we can and can’t say.
The Liberate Tate campaign took six years to persuade Tate to end its sponsorship deal with BP in 2016. Their primary tactic was visually striking protests at Tate venues. In under a year, three open letters organised by FFB led to the end of sponsorship agreements between ten literary festivals and Baillie Gifford. The salient difference? We organised the workers.
Whatever your view, this episode demonstrated the power of writers, booksellers, illustrators, publishing staff and translators when we organise as workers. Authors have protested literary sponsors many times before: Alice Oswald withdrew from the TS Eliot Prize Shortlist in 2011 due to its new sponsor, Aurum; Arundhati Roy threatened to boycott Hay in 2019 over its sponsor, Tata; and in 2002, many authors boycotted Hay over its sponsorship with Nestlé. Never before have we organised as workers to withdraw our labour, and the backlash FFB received must be understood in this context.
We will continue to organise as workers. To paraphrase Marx, we have very little to lose and much to gain, both for ourselves and for communities in Palestine and on the frontline of the climate crisis. From festivals to blogs to the spines of books themselves, the publishing industry is built on our labour. We do not have to content ourselves with conditional, turncoat patronage and scraps.
However begrudgingly, festival management teams and boards must recognise that they rely on capital (publishers and sponsors) and labour (writers) to deliver events. As shown by the events of last year, festivals operating on terms acceptable to capital alone will not be successful; festival managers must cultivate good relationships with labour.
Last year in the UK, five members of Just Stop Oil were sentenced to a total of 21 years in prison for blocking the M25, a record-breaking sentence for a non-violent protest. This year, the US federal government is threatening to withdraw funding from the universities where students called for divestment from Israeli genocide. Meanwhile, the genocide in Palestine continues, and so does the climate crisis.
Literary festivals and the publishing industry have been keen to capitalise on progressive movements, publishing and programming minority writers and environmentalists, and some Palestinian authors. At FFB, we know this well. The 800 authors and book workers who signed our statement belong to all generations and backgrounds. Many of us have family in countries where floods, droughts and landslides are destroying homes and livelihoods and crops, as well as in Palestine. Many of us were raised in the shadow of economic collapse and the Iraq war. We cannot declare that all human life is equal — and read from books about justice and minority communities — on stages paid for by an institution financing arms companies, tech giants supporting genocidal AI bombing campaigns, and corporations drilling in the Amazon. If festivals and the literary sector more broadly want to be the long-term home of progressive intellectual thought, if they want to reach diverse audiences, they cannot meet political speech by writers — especially where they disagree with that speech — with panic and smears. They must come to the table, soberly, and take the long view.
FFB has spent many months meeting, organising writers and workers across the publishing industry and consulting with different community groups. We have decided, by consensus, to focus on organising as workers through trade unions. From local government cuts to falling salaries to complicity in Israeli apartheid, and the vilification of authors for political speech, so much of the harm done to authors and the literary sector is best countered by a strong, inclusive trade union (or a coalition of multiple unions) that can formally negotiate on behalf of authors and other workers.
A bold trade union, with an active membership, is the reason screenwriters in the US were able to negotiate with streaming services, such as Netflix, to triple their pay last year. This is also how junior doctors in the UK secured a 22 percent pay rise, and why the pension fund for actors in the UK has no investments in fossil fuels or Israeli apartheid, occupation and genocide. Trade unions are the best way we can consolidate our leverage as workers and build enough power to negotiate with governments about AI, and with institutions in solidarity with Palestine and communities on the frontline of the climate crisis. FFB calls on all workers in the book industry to join their trade union and has created a mutual aid fund to help subsidise memberships.
I urge everyone — from festival directors, to journalists, to angry tweeters unable to imagine a principled collective of authors operating without ‘leaders’, or ‘funders’ — to proceed constructively based on facts. A year on, it is clear that the claims made about FFB were untrue: FFB did not bully anyone or spread misinformation; the literary festivals have survived without Baillie Gifford’s sponsorship; and, far from being a threat to freedom of speech, our campaign has shown the commitment of writers to speaking truth to power, despite the cost.