28 July 2010
By Sandy Neil
Traquair House is inviting you to travel beyond borders and explore the world’s small nation cultures at the new international arts festival Borders, Books and Bikes on August 14 and 15.
Writers, thinkers and artists from Palestine, Zimbabwe, Georgia, Kurdistan and Sierra Leone will join storytellers from Scotland to guide two days of walks, talks and cycling in Traquair’s grounds and surrounding countryside.
The mind behind the event is Mark Muller Stuart QC, founder of Beyond Borders: an organisation dedicated to harnessing Scotland’s heritage to help promote understanding and reduce conflict between world cultures.
“Scotland acts as a beacon to nations and unrecognised peoples around the world seeking to protect their own way of life through non-violent ways,” said Mark, an international human rights lawyer, who lives at Traquair with his wife Catherine and their children.
Catherine is currently organising this weekend’s Traquair Fair, this year celebrating its 30th anniversary with a Beyond Borders theme of its own, featuring international art and artists from Cuba, Afghanistan, Palestine and Georgia.
The Borders, Books and Bikes line-up in August includes Nobel Peace Prize nominee and Sakharov Prize-winner Leyla Zana, who was in 1991 elected Turkey’s first Kurdish woman MP, but was subsequently imprisoned for 10 years for taking her oath in her native language, when speaking it even in private was illegal.
Leading a hill walk and talk on Palestine and the Israeli occupation is Raja Shehedah, author of Palestinian Walks: Notes of a Vanishing Landscape, and winner of the 2008 Orwell Prize for political writing. Two photographic exhibitions, Cityscapes of Palestine and Capturing Kurdistan, also illustrate the lives lived in the two cultures.
Zimbabwean writer and Faber prize-winning poet, Petina Gappah, reads her portraits of life and people in contemporary Zimbabwe, while the country’s MDC culture minister, David Coltart, and the director of Mugabe and the White African, Andy Thomson, discuss where now for Zimbabwe with the BBC’s former Africa correspondent Allan Little.
Allan is also in conversation with award-winning BBC journalist and now full-time novelist Aminatta Forna on her biographical and literary stories of love and loss in Sierra Leone’s civil war.
Radical lawyer Michael Mansfield QC shares his memoirs of a career defending the likes of the Birmingham Six, the families of Bloody Sunday and Jean Charles de Menezes, and Colombian philosopher and cultural critic Dr Oscar Guardiola-Rivera then argues the case why Latin America should rule the world.
True to the spirit of cultural exchange, the festival also celebrates Scotland’s heritage, with Border historian and broadcaster Alistair Moffat reading tales of the Highland Clans, and Scots storytellers John Nicol and Colin Scott-Moncrieff leading bike rides from Abbotsford and Neidpath Castle to Traquair. Mary Kenny also brings 900 years of local history alive on a wood walk, while Borders writer Fi Martyn Oga leads a literary hill walk, meeting working artists Silvia Woodcock, Caroline McNairn and Joseph Maxwell Stuart on the way.
For more information visit www.beyondborders2010.com