The problem with running a successful literary festival, Brian Johnstone found, was that “it doesn’t give you time for writing any of your own”. Not that the director of StAnza, the poetry jamboree at St Andrews, was complaining. “You try to build in some downtime to fit in some writing but after a while it somehow just disappears, especially given the wonderful way that StAnza has taken off,” he told The Courier in 2010, when stepping down. “It is a very creative thing devising programmes and putting ideas together but I think it’s indicative of the time factor involved that my first collection was published in 1997, just before I got really involved with StAnza, and my second only just came out at the end

Source: The Times May 20, 2021 23:00 UTC