By Bill Heaney
It’s onward and upward for the Book Festival this year as the 2021 programme is now live and online events can be booked from today.
This August, enjoy over 250 events for adults and children online from home, offered on a Pay What You Can basis. You can watch the events live online during the Festival dates 14-30 August or catch up at a time that suits you. There’s also the opportunity to chat with fellow book fans and connect with authors including the fabulous Maggie O’Farrell, pictured right, using the online chatroom and live Q&A which proved very popular last year.
In this exciting new chapter for the Book Festival, a wide range of the live-streamed events will also have in-person audiences at our new 2021 Festival home, the Edinburgh College of Art. Tickets for watching events in-person go on sale at midday on 22 July. See each event page on the website to find out whether you can buy a ticket to watch it in-person, and if authors will be appearing remotely or will be physically present on stage in the venue.
The Book Festival is for everyone, whether you are in the position to pay for a ticket or not, whether you can join us in Edinburgh or from your sofa. You’ll need to book for any online events you want to watch – but don’t worry, with an unlimited capacity you won’t miss out on your favourite events!
We’re bringing over 300 of the world’s best authors, artists and thinkers – both established and emerging, local and international – to this year’s hybrid Festival. Some will be joining us live in our studios in Edinburgh and others from their homes across the globe. Each with stories, hopes and dreams to share, topics to explore, experiences to reflect on, or issues to discuss and debate, as we all try and make sense of today’s complex and changing world.
Whether online or in person, we hope you can join the conversation. Here are just some of our literary guests appearing this August:
- Douglas Stuart, pictured right, winner of the 2020 Booker Prize, joins Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon to discuss his bestselling novel Shuggie Bain.
- Kazuo Ishiguro returns to the Festival with his first novel since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, Klara and the Sun.
- Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo interviews three authors as part of Black Britain: Writing Black, curated by Evaristo herself.
- Salman Rushdie takes part in BBC journalist Allan Little’s Big Interview.
- Ali Smith and artist Sarah Wood share a new short film in a special one-off live event.
- Winners of the 2021 International Booker Prize, David Diop and Anna Moschovakis, discuss their unforgettable short novel At Night All Blood is Black.
- Jed Mercurio and Prasanna Puwanarajah bring us their much-anticipated graphic novel Sleeper.
- Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o joins us from his home in Kenya to discuss The Power of Nine, his first book since 2004.
- Raynor Winn talks about her new memoir, The Wild Silence, with Sally Magnusson.
- Graeme Armstrong shares a short film and discusses his debut novel The Young Team, as part of our Reading Scotland series of events.
- Professor of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh, Devi Sridhar, presents a special discussion on the different government responses to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Plus, unmissable events with Maggie O’Farrell, Elif Shafak, Ian Rankin, Matt Haig, Richard Flanagan, Amartya Sen, Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband, Alexander McCall Smith, Jackie Kay, Val McDermid, Carol Ann Duffy, Andrew O’Hagan, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pat Barker, Eimear McBride, Olivia Laing and many more.
Andrew O’Hagan at the Edinburgh Book Festival. Top of page picture is of film star Brian Cox and his wife with Bill Paterson in Charlotte Square. Pictures by Bill Heaney