What's on | Edinburgh International Book Festival

Welcome to the Book Festival

Set in a specially created tented village in the heart of Edinburgh, the Edinburgh International Book Festival offers something for just about every age and interest, bringing readers and writers together for inspiration, entertainment and discussion.

The Book Festival welcomes around 1000 authors in over 900 events for adults and children each year including novelists, poets, scientists, philosophers, sportsmen, illustrators, comic creators, historians, musicians, biographers, environmentalists, economists, Nobel and Booker prize-winners and many more besides.

The 2019 Book Festival will take place from 10-26 August.

Full details of the programme, including authors, themes and events with BSL interpretation and captioning will be available here from mid-June.

Request a brochure for the 2019 Festival

In the meantime, you can enjoy Festival photographs, listen to or download free podcasts of event recordings and watch exclusive interviews and Festival highlights from past Book Festivals here on our website, on our YouTube channel and on itunes.

2018 Book Festival Highlights

Friends chatting over a book in the Book Festival

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Look, Listen & read

Pussy Riot's Maria Alyokhina with Yanis Varoufakis (2018 Event)

'To back down an inch is to give up a mile,' says Maria Alyokhina in Riot Days, her account of Pussy Riot’s extraordinary rise to infamy in 2012. Following an iconoclastic balaclava-clad performance in a Moscow cathedral, Alyokhina and two of her collaborators were arrested and sentenced to two years in a prison in the Urals. In this unmissable event filmed live at the 2018 Edinburgh International Book Festival, Yanis Varoufakis discusses with Maria Alyokhina the different varieties of totalitarianism tha…