Ceud Mìle Fàilte
Michael Pedersen is prize-winning Scottish author, currently serving as both Edinburgh’s Makar (Poet Laureate) and the Writer in Residence at Edinburgh University. His books include Boy Friends, The Cat Prince, and, his newly published lighthouse novel, Muckle Flugga (Faber & Faber, 2025). He’s won both a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship and the Books Are My Bag Readers Award, having also been shortlisted for the Forward Prizes for Poetry and the Saltire National Book Awards. Pedersen’s work has attracted praise from the likes of Stephen Fry, Bernardine Evaristo, Irvine Welsh, Nicola Sturgeon and beyond, and been translated into French, German, Spanish, and Estonian. www.michaelpedersen.co.uk
Let us throng together, when we’re lonely
& laden, when the moon’s gone squiffy
as an old pickle; after waking late & naked
in the imagination’s lost & found. Hop on
this costumed carousel known only
as Festival. Alight one orbit up in a broth
of bewilderment: heart chirruping,
gulps of gorgeousness guzzled back. & who
doesn’t need a stiff dose of oneness
right about now, just as the dream
risks spaghetti-ing itself. Yes, art;
yes music & theatre & every madcap realm
in-between. Think of bluebells
thrusting through hunks of pavement
in floral defiance of their concrete
overlords. This is our cast: oddballs,
miracle-workers & hip priests, sword
swallowing secret-keepers, the twizzle
-tongued & sherbet-lipped. Imagine:
the whole orchestra, having just about
blown the roof off it, suddenly
diminuendo to a single stringed pin
-drop. Wow. Fire in the gut, let it burn.
Imagine: a dozen, no a thousand,
even tens of thousands of skins pimpling
in unison, hairs raised in awe, as if
antennae readying the body for take-off.
There’s globe-trotters chasing it
as home bunnies rejoice that it’s finally
boomeranging back into town; haters
eating crow as gamblers count
their lucky chips. Heartthrobs
in every corner, in this place
called Festival where a face
like an angry mousetrap can smash
into a stramash of smiling splinters
with one well-wired word. This place,
where the boogeymen are ticket touts
& grudge-bearing critics;
where the kookiest, the queerest,
the most topsy-turvy, all flume ride
in with their fuses lit,
as if sparklers never fizzle out,
because they don’t, not really.
Where the sign reads: all wonder
is welcome here. Repeating itself only
when necessary, because, sorry,
sometimes it is: all wonder,
welcome, here.
Ceud Mìle Fàilte can be translated as “A Hundred Thousand Welcomes”. This poem was prepared by Michael Pederson, Edinburgh’s Maker, for the opening of the European Festivals Association’s Arts Festivals Summit on 27 April 2025 at the City Chambers in Edinburgh, hosted by the Edinburgh International Festival, Festivals Edinburgh, and the City of Edinburgh Council.
Festival Life creates shared moments of audiences and artists, eye-to-eye
