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Hundreds of events for adults, teenagers and children feature authors, illustrators, musicians, poets, policians, thinkers, prize-winners and rising stars every August.
Alan Parks’s May God Forgive finds a Glasgow in mourning; an arson attack has left five dead and ignited a dark spark in the city. In Denzil Meyrick’s The Death of Remembrance, a constable’s choice to walk away from the site of a crime has...
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...
From C S Lewis to Philip Pullman, writers have used fantasy to explore religion. This session explores three lesser-known examples, The Man Who Was Thursday by G K Chesterton, Mr Weston’s Good Wine by T F Powys and Mr Pye by Mervyn Peake. Why has...
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...
Is motherhood something that all women must contend with even if they make other choices with their lives? Julie Myerson’s Nonfiction shows maternal love as something we both need and fear. Guadalupe Nettel’s Still Born presents maternal ambivalence...
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...
Can writers give us a fresh perspective on global and local issues? Each afternoon a leading writer discusses books, research and ideas confronting this time of uncertainty and change.
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...
To misquote Tolstoy, every family is happy in its own way – and two new novels from Claire Fuller and Miriam Toews suggest some surprising opportunities for joy. Fuller’s Costa Award-winning Unsettled Ground hurls middle-aged twins into a world they...