John Burnside and Jon Kalman Stefansson (2015 Event)

International Booker Prize: First Interview with the 2020 Winner Since 2016, the International Booker Prize has been given annually to a single book in English translation, with the £50,000 award shared equally between author and translator to acknowledge their extraordinary contribution to world literature, and the f… Brit Bennett: How the Other Twin Lives For a novel that begins in 1968, Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half may well be the timeliest fiction book of the year. Back in 2014, following the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Bennett wrote an essay for Jezebel called ‘I don’t know … Anne Applebaum: Democracy Under Siege ‘Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all of our societies eventually will.’ Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Anne Applebaum’s bleak prognosis for liberal democracy lies at the hea… Maggie Nelson: The Many Meanings of Freedom Named by Olivia Laing as ‘among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of her generation,’ Maggie Nelson is a hugely influential critical theorist whose writing defies genre. She has written art criticism, memoir, poetry and scholarship, and gained a c… Shokoofeh Azar: After the Iranian Revolution When Shokoofeh Azar received the news that she was the first ever Iranian writer to be shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, she was transported back to when she was 15 years old, ‘in the village, surrounded by rainforest and rice fields, and … Garth Greenwell: Intimate Truths The annual Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Awards delights in taking bundles of limbs and badly chosen adjectives, removing them from their context and mocking them for their unsexiness. But there is real power in its opposite: by capturing the truth o… Houzan Mahmoud: Smoke Coming From My Soul Kurdish Women’s Stories is the brainchild of Houzan Mahmoud, a Kurdish writer, public lecturer and anti-war activist. Unforgettable and deeply moving, it’s a vitally important book which goes beyond the common depiction of women simply as victims of w… Janey Godley: Secrets in 70s Glasgow One of Scotland’s most beloved comedians continues to blaze a trail – this time taking a step into crime fiction. With her debut novel Nothing Left Unsaid, Janey Godley takes us to 1970s Glasgow via the diary of a dying mother. In the tenements of She… Reading Scotland: Jen Hadfield, Landscape and Light Poet Jen Hadfield sometimes writes outside near her home on Shetland, taking a notebook with her and disappearing into the landscape, returning when she gets cold and hungry. The islands – situated between Scotland and Norway – have provided fertile i… Cathy Newman at the Edinburgh International Book Festival Bloody Brilliant Women is Channel 4 News anchor Cathy Newman’s paean to those women who’ve shaped modern Britain, with the likes of Emmeline Pankhurst sharing pages with heroes like Beatrice Shilling, whose engineering prowess helped win the Battle of…