Monthly e-news: May 2026 edition
Festival dates: 15-30 August
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It’s May and we’re well on the way!
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It feels like ages since we wrote to you last, but maybe that’s just because SO much has happened this past month!
We’ve launched the Schools programme, released the first tickets of the 2026 season with our amazing Front List line-up, and, behind the scenes (🤫), we may or may not have finalised the design for this year’s Book Festival brochure (okay, yes… it’s literally with the printers right now – eek!).
All will be revealed in due course, but we can definitely promise that excitement will only continue to grow from here. ✨
In this months e-news, you’ll find:
Quite a lot to get your teeth into, so let’s go! 😉
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Not long at all until we announce the full 2026 Book Festival programme: a glorious line-up of hundreds (upon hundreds) of authors, artists, thinkers, performers, musicians, poets, and the occasional costume character (we can neither confirm nor deny that the Gruffalo will be returning). Pop these dates in your diary:
Programme announced: Tuesday 16 June
Tickets go on sale: Thursday 25 June, 10am
(P.S. Did you know that you can get advanced access to booking – along with some other cool perks, and the warm glow of knowing you’re supporting our year-round community work – if you become a Book Festival Member?)
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In the meantime… The Front List is on sale now
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Last month we announced the first 15 events of the Festival: The Front List events! ✨
All taking place in the historic McEwan Hall, this special programme features a thrilling line-up of big thinkers (like Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and Enshiffication author Cory Doctorow), prize-winning novelists (like the incredible Kiran Desai, Colson Whitehead, and Douglas Stuart), powerful personalities (like comedian Mel Giedroyc, interviewed by none other than her comedy partner Sue Perkins, and poet, playwright, and songwriter Kae Tempest), hard-hitting journalists (like The News Agents’ Lewis Goodall and New York Times correspondent Edward Wong)… aaaand international superstars (like Outlander creator Diana Gabaldon) – and more!
Tickets for these events are on sale now, so book them while you can.
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Edinburgh Libraries win big at the British Book Awards
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HUGE congratulations to the amazing Edinburgh Libraries, who were recognised as the overall Library of the Year Award winners at the British Book Awards this past week! 🎉
Working with them as partners in our Paper Trails programme, we’ve experienced first-hand all the care and effort they put into initiatives like the Mobile Library Service, and we’re so happy to see this hard work recognised by such a prestigious award. The judges specifically highlighted an incredible programme working with HMP Edinburgh to deliver books to prisoners at Christmas, which is believed to be one of the first of it’s kind in the UK.
As devout supporters (and lovers) of libraries, we can’t wait to continue working with them over the next few years. 💙
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Celebrating Local History Month at Ratho Library
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Speaking of libraries… this Monday, we kicked off an exciting week of free (!) events that we co-created with the team at Ratho Library as part of our Paper Trails project, focused on celebrating local history and the importance for all ages of understanding what came before you.
Events earlier this week featured Claire Mitchell and Zoe Venditozzi (campaigners and hosts of the Witches of Scotland podcast), and Edinburgh University writer-in-residence, Mary Paulson-Ellis, with her new historical fiction novel, Emily Noble’s Disgrace.
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Sound like something you’d like to go along to? Well, you’re in luck because there are still tickets available to both events this upcoming Saturday!
For the wee ones, Elle McNicoll hosts an event on caring about the past through her new children’s book, A Kind of Spark, and later in the afternoon, historian Alistair Moffat discusses how his journal-style novel set in the Scottish Borders, The Secret History of Here, helped him explore the wonder of the place he was raised.
Tickets are completely free and can be reserved at the link above, or by popping into Ratho Library and chatting with their lovely staff 💙
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Beyond the Margins: Poetry in Motion
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If you’re wandering around Edinburgh over the next few weeks, make sure to look out for a brand-new public exhibition lining the city’s streets.
Called Beyond the Margins: Poetry in Motion, it’s the outpouring of a 10-week project we’ve been running as part of Paper Trails with Streetreads Library – a community space specially designed for people experiencing homelessness. Working closely with the community there, poet Hannah Lavery and illustrator Katie Quinn have led interactive creative sessions to explore themes including home, identity, movement, and belonging.
This thought-provoking exhibition will be displayed city-wide throughout the summer, and on our Festival site this August too!
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May Reading List: Terrific Translations
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An apartment jungled with houseplants that only show up dust when the sun shines in. Two young sisters running through sea-salted streets in the dead of night. A slaughterhouse stun operator driving to work past a river red with blood…
With the winners of 2026’s International Booker Prize announced earlier this week (shout out to author Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and translator Lin King who won with Taiwan Travelogue 👏), it seems only right to continue the celebration of incredible translated fiction with this month’s Reading List. Each wildly different, yet all deeply evocative in their own way, these stories will linger with you long after you set them down.
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There is something unnerving at the heart of each story in this gorgeous collection from Schweblin, author of the International Booker Prize-shortlisted Fever Dream. The stories grapple with guilt, memory, family bonds, loss, longing, love – the prose, translated by Megan McDowell, shimmers with light. ‘No one writes like Samanta Schweblin,’ says Lorrie Moore, a master of the short story form herself. Read it, read it, read it.
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A satire of (a certain kind of) millennial lifestyle, Perfection follows an expat couple living and carefully curating their lives in Berlin – all is not as perfect as it seems from the pictures, though; restlessness bristles close to the surface. Thomas McMullan in the Guardian describes the book as ‘deliciously pessimistic’, Ayşegül Savaş said she read it ‘in a breath’. We think you will too.
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Don’t be fooled by this book’s slightness – it packs a gut-punch. Set in a slaughterhouse in an impoverished corner of Brazil, the novel follows a stun operator who’s haunted by the look in the eyes of the cows he is paid to kill. And then the animals start disappearing, and men start dying (accidentally and not). ‘A fresh and spirited report on how civilisation has done nothing to tame humanity’s worst instincts,’ writes John Self in the Guardian.
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This bizarre, original story collection wriggles free of neat genre tags. Sometimes playful, sometimes bleak, the stories mix elements of horror, folktale, speculative fiction, surrealism, and are all rooted in the worries and woes of contemporary life. ‘Don’t read this book while eating,’ warns Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen in The Saturday Paper, ‘but don’t skip these unflinching, intelligent stories, either.’
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Shortlisted for 2019’s Man Booker International Prize, this ecological neo-noir is both a crime novel and more than that. Featuring an eccentric narrator, two missing dogs, an unexplained murder, and musings on free will and William Blake… it’s both entertaining and profound. Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker wrote that the book’s ‘one of the most existentially refreshing novels [she’s] read in a long time’.
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And that’s all from us for now. Keep up with all the latest from the Book Festival on our social media (@edbookfest), and we’ll be back in your inboxes next month. See you then!
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