Edinburgh International Book Festival Edinburgh International Book Festival

Local writers and poets from across Edinburgh come together to create a collective love letter to the city they call home.


Episode 3:

Flic McCann

Jacqueline Gilchrist

Hilary Birch

Anne Hogarth

Local writers and poets from across Edinburgh come together to create a collective love letter to the city they call home.


Episode 2:

Elaine Harris

Sylvia Trotter

Janet Lewis

Susan Cheney

Local writers and poets from across Edinburgh come together to create a collective love letter to the city they call home. 


 


Episode 1:


Barbara Munro


Anna Phillips


Anne Milne


Billy Cornwall

Marian Keyes didn’t start writing until her twenties, she felt that she was ‘all washed up at 30.’ But readers have had a love affair with Keyes that has lasted over two decades now.


It’s hard to imagine a greater, more reliable comfort than a new book by Marian Keyes landing solidly in your lap, promising all the qualities that have come to define her work: complicated family dynamics, bountiful quantities of laughter, skeletons in the closet and uncomfortable moments of truth that lie close to the bone. Her latest, Grown Ups, centres around Cara Casey, who after a bang on the head finds herself incapable of keeping mum on the family secrets.


With more than 35 million copies sold of her 13 novels to date, Keyes’s own brand of irrepressible, generous, hilarious storytelling goes from strength to strength. Join Keyes and writer Jenny Colgan for an hour of unforgettable grown-up fun in this event recorded live at the 2020 Book Festival.




 

‘You were always sitting in character, you were just never sure which one.’ So says Norah to the memory of her mother in Actress, the new novel by Anne Enright. The mother in question is Katherine O’Dell, who died aged 58 – the same age Norah has now reached.


Actress is a portrait of life in the theatre, of one woman’s rise to fame and her subsequent decline, with all the challenges that women on stage faced in the years before the #MeToo movement shone light on them. But this novel is also a tender examination of the relationship between mother and daughter – the reconstruction of an emotional landscape in which fame has left a trail of newspaper articles, photographs and public performances.


For this event, recorded live at the 2020 Book Festival, the Booker Prize-winning novelist is joined by Vicky Featherstone, Artistic Director of the Royal Court Theatre and the first Artistic Director of the National Theatre of Scotland, to discuss this sensitive portrayal of a life lived in the spotlight.

While the Summer of Love is about to unfold across the Atlantic, life in 1967 isn’t so easy for a young would-be musician in London’s shabby Charing Cross Road. Yet from this modest starting point, David Mitchell builds a joyful fictional biography of a band that will take the world by storm. Utopia Avenue is the finest prog-folk band you have never heard of, and the novel of the same name is a stylish romp through the rags-to-riches lives of drummer Griff, singer Elf, guitarist Jasper and bass player Dean.


Organised around the song titles of the band’s albums, Utopia Avenue's clever structure also gives it a powerful narrative drive – with added zest from a series of cheeky cameo appearances by real-life rock legends including David Bowie and Leonard Cohen.


Funny, whip-smart and occasionally veering into the fantastical, it is one of the most compellingly entertaining reads of 2020. Join Mitchell in this event recorded live at the 2020 Book Festival as he shares his notes with folk singer and musician Sam Amidon, who also plays some of his most recent music.