Each year at the festival a bookshop is born out of the earth. We call it G-Books, but it’s actually run for us by the good folks at St Andrews Bookshop.
For the last few years, they’ve put in the hard yards to make sure that the onsite festival book store’s shelves are piled high with the titles of all of our guest speakers, writers and poets – with an added serving of great faith-filled, Greenbelt-shaped books to boot.
Each year, Greenbelters leave the festival site stocked up with books by the wonderful speakers they’ve heard as well as some they’ve never heard of before. Our top tip is to bring an extra bag with you to carry your new books home with you.
It’s a lot of hot and hard work ensuring that the bookshop is well stocked and runs smoothly. Books are heavy and Greenbelters buy a lot of them! Each year, publishers are amazed at how engaged our audience is and how committed you are to buying books by those you’ve heard speak at the festival.
The wonderful thing about the festival setting is that a lot of our guest speakers and writers will actually take time out to do a book signing as well as their main session. So it’s your chance to get your copy signed and to meet the author and share a few words. Sometimes authors are there for hours – just chatting and signing.
Because St Andrews know the festival really well, they’ve got a good nose for what will go well at Greenbelt. They know the writers that are firm festival favourites and will always sell copies even if they’re not on the bill.
Buying a book (or three) is a great way of taking Greenbelt inspiration home with you. A speaker will only be able to give you a headline summary of their project. But a book will flesh that out. It will be like taking a Greenbelt companion with you into autumn.
Especially when we won’t be gathering as a full festival until 2028 – you’ll want to be sure of all the Greenbelt reading you can be. From Jordan Stephens to Mina Smallman, Nick Lowles to Ann Pettifor, and from Belle Tindall-Riley to Harry Baker and Pádraig Ó Tuama – there will be so many great thinkers and writers at Greenbelt this year, and G-Books is the place for you to make sure to take some of their inspiration and provocation home with you.
Poetry, theology, ‘how to’, pastoral, spiritual, political, economic, autobiographical – you name it, there will be a wide selection of writing available.
So our thanks go once again to St Andrews Bookshop for making time for us in their busy summer events calendar and for the calm and collected way they make G-Books work – without any fuss and with good grace and professionalism.