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Her role has changed a little since then, but she retains the spirit of those early days and the push to encourage people to come and live and work and enjoy Wigtown. She helped to set up the marquee on the main square and and kept the coffee area clean and tidy. "It still gives me chills thinking about how it was then."īy the time she was at university studying marketing and events and needed 200 hours of work experience, however, the town was changing and she secured a place with the book festival which had started in 1999. "Lots of our friends at school had to move away with their families so they could find employment elsewhere," she said. Listen to news for Dumfries and Galloway on BBC Sounds

Read more stories from the south of Scotland She said that on the day Wigtown became book town - there were 83 properties on the market following the closures of the local creamery and distillery. "I remember walking to school past the building that we're in now (The Print Room) and the windows were boarded up with paint flaking off the walls and there were dozens of buildings like that in the town." "The town really fell on its knees when I was growing up," she said. She remembers film crews turning up in the build-up to the announcement. The aim was to regenerate the chosen area by basing the model on the successful Hay-on-Wye Festival.Īnne, who is now operational director of the book festival, wrote a letter of support as a schoolgirl explaining why Wigtown should win.