Your browser is outdated, and does not support some features used by our website.
We recommend using a recent version of Chrome, Firefox, Edge, or Safari. You may continue to explore the site in this browser, but most interactive features will not work as expected.
Hundreds of events for adults, teenagers and children feature authors, illustrators, musicians, poets, policians, thinkers, prize-winners and rising stars every August.
Philippe Sands QC’s The Last Colony chronicles the unlawful mistreatment of the inhabitants of the Chagos Islands by the British Government. In this illustrated performance he presents readings and images together with RSC and Bridgerton actor Adjoa...
400 years on, the story of Mary, Queen of Scots, still grips our imaginations. Rosemary Goring’s Homecoming narrates the 12 years Mary spent in Scotland. In The Green Lady, Sue Lawrence spins a mystery from the lives of the women surrounding the...
How does the United Nations use the law to hold governments to account? In The Last Colony Philippe Sands QC highlights the case of the Chagos Archipelago. In the 1960s, Britain forcibly removed the inhabitants of the island. Join Sands today in...
Can relationships last against the backdrop of war? Danny Ramadan’s The Foghorn Echoes shows us the forbidden love of two boys in war-torn Syria. Pajtim Statovci’s Bolla takes us to 90s Kosovo, where a newly married Arsim falls in love with a...
What does a fist fight by an open grave have to do with the Skelf women? As funeral directors, they deal with death every day – but the possibility of a faked demise thrusts these private investigators in the path of a danger closer to home. In this...
Kit de Waal’s influence across contemporary British literature is so broad as to be almost immeasurable. So how is it that one of our titans of the written word grew up with only the Bible to read? De Waal comes to this year’s Festival to chat about...
We proudly welcome the winner of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize to the Book Festival. Maria Ressa faces 100 years behind bars in her home country. Her ‘crime’? Tracking the lies told by her government. In How to Stand Up to a Dictator, she lays bare how...
Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Black and Female brings together essays on the ‘nervous condition’ of being a Black woman in a supposedly post-colonial world. Esi Edugyan’s Out of the Sun comprises five essays on Afrofuturism, immigration and the concept...
Hamnet was a runaway bestseller before winning the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2020. Unsurprisingly, Maggie O’Farrell’s latest novel is one of the most hotly-anticipated of 2022. Today, in conversation with Damian Barr, the Edinburgh-based writer...
In 1998, Irvine Welsh published his first detective novel, Filth, featuring Detective Inspector Ray Lennox. Now, Lennox is back in Edinburgh. In The Long Knives, a corrupt, racist Scottish MP with plenty of enemies is found dead behind a warehouse in...
Announcing our Communities Programme and Citizen events this August 
