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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.
One of a generation of Chilean writers who grew up under the brutal dictatorship of General Pinochet, Nona Fernández offers new perspectives on history. She appears at the Festival for the first time, discussing her novel The Twilight Zone –...
Booker-Prize finalist NoViolet Bulawayo joins us to discuss the ruthlessness of absolute power and the hope that underpins resistance. In her razor-sharp Glory, a long-serving leader falls and a country implodes. Bearing witness to the chaos, a goat...
Mieko Kawakami’s award-winning early novel, Breasts and Eggs, divided opinions: the conservative governor of Tokyo called it ‘unpleasant and intolerable’, while Irish novelist Naoise Dolan holds ‘Mieko Kawakami is a genius’. In today’s...
In 1985, Raja Shehadeh’s father Aziz was murdered in a pre-meditated knife attack. The circumstances of the crime are the subject of his Strangers in the House. Today, through his new memoir, Shehadeh sheds a different light on the father-son...
In 2021, nearly 40 years after his first novel was published, Damon Galgut won the Booker Prize for The Promise. With typical humility, Galgut said that while he’s grateful for the win, it ‘creates an artificial popularity that will take a while to...
Who better to chronicle Scotland’s role in international affairs than Murray Pittock, one of Scotland’s leading historians? He has authored a series of key texts on Scottish history and identity and brought his huge expertise to bear on a roster of...
Helen Garner is one of Australia’s most exciting, inventive and prolific writers. For more than half a century, her writing has been celebrated for its unerring sharpness and empathy. How to End a Story, the third volume of her published diaries, is...
On the years of dictatorship in Argentina, Mariana Enríquez said ‘I did not distinguish between reality and fiction because reality was worse than any fiction I could imagine’. Her gothic stories add gravity to that statement. Now, she discusses...
Like Ali Smith, Lydia Davis and José Saramago, Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra makes work that’s both thoughtful and profoundly insightful. His latest novel, Chilean Poet, is set in a country that boasts two Nobel Prize-winning poets: Pablo Neruda...