Diana Gabaldon at Edinburgh International Book Festival

Edinburgh Book Festival logo

Diana Gabaldon will be appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in Scotland on Tuesday, 23 August, at 2:30 pm UK time (9:30 am ET).

According to the festival's website:
We are the largest public celebration of the written word in the world. Every August we bring around 700 writers and thinkers from across the planet together to rub shoulders with you, the audience.

UPDATE 8/23/2022 11:10 am. The recording of Diana's talk is available, for people who registered for the event, HERE. It's about 1 hour 10 minutes long. Unfortunately this video doesn't appear to work for everyone. If they put it up on YouTube or some other way that does not require a login to view it, I'll update this post. Sorry about that!

I thoroughly enjoyed Diana's talk. Not much in the way of "breaking news", but here are a few tidbits:

- She has written an episode for Season 7 that they haven't started filming yet.
- She wrote a 3 page synopsis of the Brian/Ellen prequel that she gave to the people developing the TV prequel. She is, of course, still writing that book.
- The one-word theme of BEES is "loyalty". I can't remember if we'd heard that before.

Emotional highlight of the program: Talking about the Gaelic used in the books, at about 1 hour 5 minutes into the video, Diana mentioned a conversation she had years ago when she first started working with Ian McKinnon Taylor, who helped her with the Gaelic starting with VOYAGER.

"He said that he was afraid that Gaelic would be a dead language in 15 years" -- long pause, while Diana visibly collects herself -- "and I wrote back and said, "Well, I tell you what, Ian, if it is, it's not because you and I didn't try." And you can see she's fighting back tears.

Wow. That's only the second time I have ever seen Diana get emotional in front of an audience. (The first time was during an appearance in Germany in 2010, not long after ECHO came out, when she was reading an excerpt from a particularly emotional scene from that book.)

1 comment

Asa said...

There was one other time Diana became emotional in front of an audience. During a Q&A a woman came up to the mic to thank Diana. She said her books had helped her get through a hard season in her life.
Diana told how she was a little girl that God spoke to her. That she would write stories that would help others. She was very emotional as she said this. She said she'd never had told anyone that before. I wish I had saved that video. I don't remember now when or where that was.

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