Raja Shehadeh

Simon Callow (2010 Event) On Monday 16 August, a gentleman came to the Information Desk to return his earpiece unused. "I didn't need it", he explained; "I've just been to the Simon Callow event!" Sure enough, beloved actor Simon Callow filled our RBS Main Theatre with his… Yiyun Li reading A Tale of Two Cities The brilliant young Chinese-American writer reads her short story on the theme of Elsewhere… Irvine Welsh The man who delved into the dark reality of contemporary Edinburgh was the first of the 2009 Book Festival's late evening events. Irvine Welsh here talks about his new collection Reheated Cabbage, which brings together an eclectic mix of stories capturing… Graeme Macrae Burnet (2018 Event) The Scot who came to international attention when His Bloody Project was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Graeme Macrae Burnet has followed up that astonishing success with an elegant and evocative thriller The Accident on the A35. Set in a sleepy… James Kelman (2016 Event) With the publication of Dirt Road, Scotland’s only Booker Prize winner joins a Scottish publisher for the first time in decades. This brilliantly accessible road movie of a novel arrives with Canongate’s typical panache, alongside a film adaptation of the… Richard Ford A rare and long-awaited visit to the Book Festival in 2007 by one of America's greatest writers. Richard Ford's Independence Day is the only book ever to have won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Here he discusses his magnificent follow-… Gerda Stevenson (2018 Event) In histories written by men, good women have rarely been given much credit. In Scotland, there’s a growing urge to redress the balance and, with her new collection Quines, Gerda Stevenson has produced a very necessary corrective. These unforgettable… Tom McCarthy (2010 event) In 2010, major new literary voice Tom McCarthy joined us in Edinburgh to launch his new book, C, in which McCarthy’s hero embarked on a strange, Pynchonesque journey across the 20th century, from a Bohemian spa and the First World War, to a climax in an… Fay Weldon She's stylish, sharp, satirical and a great speaker to boot. A free spirit with a long and remarkable writing career, Fay Weldon talks in this 2007 event about her latest novel The Spa Decameron, in which ten women gather at a spa for pampering, new… Rutger Bregman: There is Hope for the Human Race (2020 Event) Superbly readable and full of fascinating evidence, historian Bregman’s book Humankind looks at how his optimistic analysis of human nature could play out in policy terms. Hyper-local participatory democracy? Schools with little or no curriculum? A change…