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Edinburgh International book Festival

Every year we bring readers and writers together in unique ways. Here we feature a range of exceptional writers from leading lights to new talent with related material we think you’ll find interesting. Some of the writers may have appeared in past events, or might appear in August events at future Festivals; some offer exclusive new work, podcasts or event recordings. Keep checking in for updates or sign up for our regular ebulletins.

A list of authors appearing in the 2012 programme will be available when our programme is launched in June.

Featured Writers

George Makana Clark

The Raw Man's harrowed narrator retells the blood stories of his encounters in order to uncover the secrets of his own ancestry; this is a work of stark and breathtaking capacity.

Doug Johnstone

Doug Johnstone

Nuclear physicist turned writer.

Theresa Breslin

Theresa Breslin is an award-winning author of over 30 books for children and young adults.

Jacques Strauss

Jacques Strauss' debut, The Dubious Salvation of Jack V., takes us to South Africa during the tail end of the apartheid in 1989, and we witness the country's complex discord through the poignant eyes of Jack, a boy plagued by portents of doom.

Alan Warner

Alan Warner

One of Scotland’s most talented and exciting contemporary novelists.

More Featured Writers

New Writing

We have commissioned fifty authors - from leading lights to new talent - to write short stories or essays, all on the theme of ‘Elsewhere’. Each new piece of work is available for you to download and read here on the website. Podcasts of the authors reading their work will be relased soon.

More new writing...

Brook Crooks by Keith Gray

They’d built this massive gate.  And the first thing I thought was, Who’d want to break into Brook High? 

Once upon a time by Debi Gliori

Stories? The importance of books? Don’t get me started. The harder life gets, the more the need to escape. Stories offer a way out, an alternative world-view, an elsewhere...

Andy Stanton

Welcome to Flaxland by Andy Stanton

Flaxland! The very name conjures up images of romantic midnight trysts, tiny state-subsidised oranges, and somebody saying ‘Flaxland’.

Kirstin Innes

Horror Story by Kirstin Innes

The hotel felt like a place where bad things had happened, she’d decided. Something chilling about the uniformity of its too-long Soviet-functional corridors, their flickering lights.