Friday 1st April 2011
'Neglected' literary icon to be honoured with festival
Scotsman
"Neglected" Scottish literary icon James Boswell, author of The Life of Samuel Johnson, is to be celebrated with a planned £1.5 million museum at his Ayrshire family home and with a brand new Boswell Book Festival devoted to his legacy.
An Edinburgh solicitor, Boswell is remembered best as Johnson's literary companion and chronicler but was also a travel writer and diarist, whose frank and racy journal became a best-seller. But he has been often overlooked in his home land.
Now an influential group of admirers are launching plans to restore the run-down family mausoleum at Auchinleck House in Ayrshire, where Boswell is buried, and turn the chapel into an exhibition centre.
In late May leading writers, from the veteran memoirist Diana Athill to war correspondent Kate Adie and actor Bill Paterson, will gather at Auchinleck for the Boswell Book Festival, themed around the art of memoir and biography.