There are events for just about every age and interest at the Book Festival, bringing readers and writers together for inspiration, entertainment and discussion. Over 900 authors appear in around 800 events, including novelists, poets, scientists, sportsmen, illustrators, comics creators, historians, musicians, biographers, Nobel and Booker prize-winners and many more besides.
British Jamaican poet Raymond Antrobus won the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry last year for The Perseverance. His compelling poetry deals with family life, the death of his father, his diagnosis with deafness and his biracial heritage. Our...
As this year's Festival theme suggests, we need new stories to make sense of a changing world that sometimes seems to make no sense at all. In this keynote contribution to the Festival, Richard Holloway explains why stories have been a critical tool for...
In 2017, we sent ten writers across the Americas for Outriders, a project of complex journeys, exploring controversial themes during which the writers exchanged ideas. Ahead of Outriders Africa later this year, Jenni Fagan and Harry Josephine Giles...
Two bold novels use age-old literary tricks to get inside the heads of characters and readers alike. Laird Hunt’s In the House in the Dark of the Woods follows a woman lost in a dangerous wood and creates a shapeshifting story you’d be wise not to...
Free your mind with a book beautifully illustrated by Syrian-born Gulnar Hajo. Nour’s Escape follows a little girl with no family, no home and seemingly no escape. But as the story criss-crosses fantasy and reality, you’ll discover how freeing a...
Goethe’s West-Eastern Divan, the poet’s personal attempt to broaden European horizons by exploring the concept of the Other and creating a poetic dialogue between East and West, marks its 200th anniversary this year. Persian academic Narguess Farzad...
ROARRRR! Drop in and join Big Cat author Emma Lazell to help her create a very big Big Cat. Make sure you place him in his natural surroundings with lots of green and leafy collaging – and be sure to remember to give him his stripes.
Former Labour MP and writer Chris Mullin returns to the murky political world of his bestselling classic A Very British Coup, in new novel The Friends of Harry Perkins. Brexit is complete, yet the nation remains divided. Fred Thompson, former aide to...
Two prolific European poets come together. Edinburgh Makar Alan Spence adds to his illustrious career of novels, short stories and poems with two new pamphlet collections Zenscotlit and Thirteen Ways of Looking at Tulips. Prague’s City Poet Sylva...
What is the process of turning an idea into a book? How can the same idea appear as very different stories? Meet two Edinburgh authors, each putting their spin on the legend of the Loch Ness Monster. Lari Don’s The Treasure of the Loch Ness Monster...