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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.
Imagine trying to escape from Auschwitz as a teenager, hiding for three days, while 3,000 SS and their bloodhounds search for you. This is the story of Rudolf Vrba, whose report on the atrocity of Auschwitz reached Roosevelt, Churchill and the Pope,...
One of Ireland’s finest journalists shares an intimate account of how the country has changed during his lifetime. There are many contradictions in Ireland’s history and the title of Fintan O’Toole’s personal history, We Don’t Know Ourselves,...
Since Scotland’s independence referendum and Brexit, the United Kingdom has felt far from united. Into this context, former editor of the Times Sir Simon Jenkins offers a timely analysis of Celtic identity, from its mysterious origins to its...
One of three major performances this year looking at today’s Scotland through the lens of its past, present and future, Hear No Evil is based on the debut novel by Sarah Smith. This production uses a fusion of sign language, image and performance to...
Meet citizens of exile in two startlingly topical novels about the traumas of displacement. Serbian writer and poet Vesna Goldsworthy follows a daughter of the elite from a Soviet satellite state to London in the 1980s. But freedom swiftly leads to...
The Bloomsbury Group of writers, artists and thinkers retain an enduring fascination for their creative and sexual liberation. Merve Emre’s annotated edition of Mrs Dalloway reveals Virginia Woolf and company afresh, through commentary and images...
Since the death of Chairman Mao in 1976, China has radically reformed. But the result has been uneven, creating real economic growth and global political influence, but also reinforcing the one-party state’s grip over its vast population. Launching...
Revel in the possibilities of art with Signe Gjessing and Selby Wynn Schwartz. Prize-winning Danish poet Signe Gjessing presents Tractatus Philosophico-Poeticus, reimagining Wittgenstein’s seminal philosophical text of 1922 to make language and...
It was a family whose fortune was built up by Valium, then destroyed by Oxycontin. Patrick Radden Keefe’s electrifying history, Empire of Pain, won the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction, but he discusses the challenges he faced in publishing...
Announcing our Communities Programme and Citizen events this August 
