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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.
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...
This year, we asked people across Scotland – of any age, background or ability – to submit their own stories responding to the prompt ‘On This Day’, to build a fascinating portrait of Scotland today. Every day at 17:00 different storytellers...
Whether it’s a phone that counts our steps or a voice-activated music system, gadgets are taking centre stage in our lives. In his new novel Appliance, Costa Award-winning writer J O Morgan imagines a future driven by technological innovation,...
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...
Send shivers up your spine with two delightfully dark novels from Ecuador and Norway. In Natalia García Freire’s This World Does Not Belong to Us, an insect-obsessed man seeking revenge on those who usurped his childhood home knows who will swarm to...
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...
Inequality, climate crisis and disease: three epic challenges for our times. According to Mariana Mazzucato, innovation by governments is essential to inspire public-private cooperation and bring about change from the bottom up. Meet the Professor of...
Fans of Roberto Bolaño will enjoy The Night, the debut novel by Venezuelan author Rodrigo Blanco Calderón. Amid nation-wide blackouts linked to Venezuela’s ongoing political and economic crisis, the boundaries between reality and fiction begin to...
On Festival nights, we present a new play based on David Keenan’s novel This is Memorial Device. The fictional history of 1980s Airdrie’s mysterious, post-punk legends, Memorial Device, Keenan’s novel has a huge cult following. This stage...
The line-up for the 2022 Book Festival is revealed 
