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 Thursday 6 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.

Angie Thomas event, March 2019

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Look, Listen & read

Akala (2018 Event)

Race and class have shaped the world of MOBO award-winning hip hop artist, poet and political commentator Akala. In Natives, his searing polemic on race in the UK, he considers his own experiences in both childhood and as an adult, and connects them to the social, political and historical context that have led us to where we are now. In this event, filmed live at the 2018 Edinburgh International Book Festival, he shares his thoughts with Heather Parry…

Neil Griffiths & Richard Powers (2018 Event)

Considered by many to be one of America’s great literary voices, National Book Award winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist Richard Powers presents The Overstory, his seductive a…

Robin Robertson (2018 Event)

A renowned poet whose work often hauntingly evokes the lives of Scottish outsiders, and a mesmerising reader of his own work, Robin Robertson strikes out with a breathtaking new pr…

The Freedom: Thumbnails by Yvonne Owuor

One evening in 2004, as part of a small rock art hunting crew, I trudged through an ancient landscape in Northern Kenya, trudging past petroglyphs and pictographs, those undeciphered messages from inhabitants past, intimidated by the land’s vast, feral…