Ian Rankin

Charly Cox, Theresa Lola & Tayi Tibble at the Edinburgh International Book Festival ‘It’s official. We’ve fallen (back) in love with poetry’ the Metro declared earlier this year, reporting a 12% increase in poetry book sales in 2018. Underpinning the boom are bold new voices exploring issues from politics to mental health on page, stage… Serhii Plokhy at the Edinburgh International Book Festival ‘Heartbreaking stories of heroism’ set against a backdrop of ‘political cynicism and scientific ignorance'. That’s how judges described the winner of 2018's Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction – Serhii Plokhy’s Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy. The… Jasper Fforde (2018 Event) Jasper Fforde has spent years on the bestseller lists with his Thursday Next books. Now he’s written a standalone novel, Early Riser, creating a world where all humans hibernate except for the Winter Consuls. Fforde’s ability to write… Conor Gearty & Douglas Murray (2017 Event) In The Strange Death of Europe, Douglas Murray travels from places where migrants land to places where they end up, talking to people who welcome them and others who don't, and finds a continent in a serious muddle. In On Fantasy Island, Conor Gearty… 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… Douglas Stuart with Damian Barr: The Making of Shuggie Bain (2020 Event) In the words of the Kirkus review: ‘You will never forget Shuggie Bain. Scene by scene, this book is a masterpiece.’ This astonishing debut is a powerful and heartbreaking story about the love between a boy and his mother, about poverty and addiction… Norman Mailer - live from America Live from America, the inimitable man of letters Norman Mailer chats via video link-up to Scottish writer Andrew O'Hagan in Edinburgh. Topics discussed in this extraordinary 2007 event include Mailer's career, his ambitions and his latest novel The Castle… 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… Jackie Kay An hour of pure pleasure with multi-talented poet, playwright, novelist, storywriter, children's author and broadcaster, Jackie Kay. In this 2008 event she discusses her latest collection of poetry Darling, which gets to the heart of love with exquisite… David Lodge David Lodge, one of the UK’s pre-eminent novelists and critics, talks about his latest book, Deaf Sentence – a brilliant, elegiac portrait of one man’s attempt to come to terms with his deafness…