Liz Lochhead

Edwyn Collins & Grace Maxwell with Ian Rankin (2015 Event) ‘Moving beyond words’ was one critic’s response to The Possibilities Are Endless, a documentary charting Edwyn Collins’ return to relative good health after two massive strokes in 2005. That film, and a recent book, were the subjec… John Byrne (2011 event) Painter and set designer, playwright and novelist, John Byrne is one of Scotland’s great polymaths. Best known for his plays the Slab Boys Trilogy and Tutti Frutti, Byrne has also designed record sleeves for Donovan and The Beatles… Sue Black with Val McDermid (2018 Event) Few people are as familiar with death as Professor Sue Black. As a forensic anthropologist she sees it in the form of human remains; at scenes of murder, at burial sites and in her lab. Black’s astonishing book, All That Remains, offers fascinating … Jeanette Winterson Lighthousekeeping, in which motherless Silver is taken in by Mr Pew, keeper of the Cape Wrath lighthouse, is an extraordinary homage to R L Stevenson by one of the most startlingly original and brilliant novelists at work today. Jeanette Winterson is also… Robert Coover (2011 Event) The reissue of his early novels as Penguin Classics in 2011 underlines his status as a giant of American literary postmodernism. Stories like Spanking the Maid, Gerald's Party and Pricksongs and Descants show that a mordant… Kay Ryan (2013 event) Kay Ryan is widely regarded as one of America’s great living poets. Her book The Best of It: New and Selected Poems won her the Pulitzer Prize in 2011… Helen & Morna Mulgray Lively chat with the Edinburgh-based crime writing twins after their 2009 Book Festival event. They discuss their joint writing technique, outline the plot to their latest novel (which centres on a cat named Gorgonzola) and ask listeners to cast a decidin… Jonathan Safran Foer (2016 Event) The bestselling US author of Everything is Illuminated launches. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Here I Am is the story of a fracturing New York family, set against the backdrop of a much wider catastrophe as an earthquake engulfs the Middle East, sparking a… Salman Rushdie (2013 event) In 1983, Salman Rushdie was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for his novel Shame and named among Granta’s inuagural Best of Young British Novelists… Julia Donaldson reading Ballad of Jemmy Button The massively popular children's writer and new Children's Laureate reading her contribution to our Elsewhere series of stories…