Edinburgh International Book Festival

A festival of open horizons and energising ideas, at the heart of Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature. 17 extraordinary days, 700 events, 600 authors, over 40 different countries represented. Download a PDF of the 2007 brochure (below right) to see what our programme offered last year. Dates for this year's Book Festival: 9 - 25 August 2008.

Festival update

The Book Festival office is a hive of activity right now. Catherine Lockerbie (Festival Director), Sara Grady (Children & Education Programme Director) and their programming team are sorting out the many final changes needed before the main programme can go to print.

The brochure will be available from 12 June, you will be able to download a copy from this website or pick one up from various libraries, book shops and arts venues around Scotland. Booking will open on 20 June, so that gives you plenty of time to decide which events you would like to see before tickets go on sale.

Our 2008 RBS Schools Programme is now available!

Highlights this year include Julia Donaldson's Songbirds show, an exclusive preview of David Almond's new book and Michael Rosen's A to Z of Poetry. Hot teen authors talk about catching the writing bug and the relationship between song and story writing and we have events specially designed for teachers, lead by top experts in the field of education. Booking for schools events opens on 25 April, check our Schools pages for more details. Download a copy of the 2008 RBS Schools Programme.

Book Festival Annual Reviews now online

Check all the facts and figures and find out how we've done by downloading our Annual Reviews from the past four years.

Watch and listen to events online

Just go to the Audio/Video section of the website where you'll find our festival podcasts as well as edited video recordings and audio recordings from last year's Book Festival along with an archive of audio recordings from previous years. Includes Norman Mailer, Alice Munro, Alan Bennett, Ian Rankin, Margaret Atwood, Jacqueline Wilson, Joyce Carol Oates, A C Grayling, Germaine Greer, Richard Dawkins, Don Paterson, Robin Robertson, Fay Weldon and many more. We will continue to add recordings (and transcripts) of events to the page so keep checking!

Great photos

Hundreds of photos are taken at the Book Festival each year - by us, by you and by all the various media photographers that descend on us over the festival period. Have a look at our gallery to see what fun we had last year!

2007 - a fantastic year

We staged over 700 events featuring 650 authors from 40 countries and over 200,000 people visited us in Charlotte Square Gardens last year to meet favourite and new authors, take part in heated debates, picnic on the grass, and experience the buzz of the world's biggest International Book Festival.

Catherine Lockerbie, Director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival said of 2007 'We've had a superb response to the Book Festival this year, with people turning out in large numbers not just for the major names, but for little known overseas authors also. From our revolutionary and highly successful LongPen events, with Norman Mailer and Alice Munro speaking and signing books from thousands of miles away, to a group of Bengali writers travelling specially from Kolkata, audience reaction to our events and themes has been notably eager, enthusiastic and engaged. Demand for sharing ideas and talking about books seems never to have been higher.'