Seven must-see events at the Edinburgh International Book Festival - David Robinson previews the 2024 programme
There’s a freshness to festival director Jenny Niven’s programming (and the design of the actual physical programme) that perfectly complements its new venue at the Edinburgh Futures Institute (the old Royal Infirmary). The daily 10am First Edition strand she has introduced in the Spiegeltent at which journalists discuss the day’s news, is a case in point: these could be boringly uninformative or excitingly unpredictable, but as what you pay is up to you, they might be a risk worth taking. Niven gets the ball rolling herself on the opening Saturday slot by picking out the highlights of her own festival (Spiegeltent, 10 August, 10am). Here are a few of mine. Ones marked with an asterisk are live-streamed.
Jen Hadfield, Amy Liptrot & Roseanne Watt This is Amy Liptrot’s Edinburgh, and the rest of us just live in it. Saoirse Ronan plays her in the film version of Liptrot’s return-to-Orkney memoir The Outrun (in the opening premiere at the film festival at the Cameo) and Vicky Featherstone directs Stef Smith’s version for the stage for the Festival further up the road at the Church Hill Theatre, but if you want to see Liptrot herself, the book festival gives you a choice of two events. Most people may be tempted by the one with Smith (Courtyard Theatre, 18 August 7:30pm). I’m opting for the island-themed one earlier that week at which Liptrot appears alongside Shetland poets Roseanne Watt, a past winner of the £20,000 Edwin Morgan Prize, and Jen Hadfield, who in September will head off to Yale to pick up a £140,000 award. And they say there’s no money in poetry … Spiegeltent, Tuesday 13 August, 1:45pm
Colm Toibin If you read Toibin’s novel Brooklyn (or even just saw Saoirse Ronan in the film version), you’ll want to hear the man himself talk about its sequel, Long Island. It’s a quiet novel about small-town love and desperation, written with such empathy and deceptive simplicity as to put me in mind of William Trevor. No higher praise in my book. Venue T, 20 August, 5pm*
Salman Rushdie The last time Sir Salman appeared live at the book festival (in 2019), he was talking about comic novel Quichotte - the funniest thing, his agent told him, that he’d ever written. After the on-stage attempt to murder him two years ago, he will be appearing remotely to talk about his book Knife, but with Radio 4’s Today programme presenter Mishal Husain asking the questions, it remains an obvious festival highlight. (Husain’s own earlier event talking about her family memoir Broken Threads should also be worth a look: Venue T, 3pm,12 August*). McEwan Hall, 5:30pm, 17 August*
Zeinab Badawi One of the best things about a book festival is that they help you fill in so many shameful pools of ignorance. For me, African history is one such, and the little I do know about it is heavily Eurocentric. Badawi, now the President of SOAS, will be talking about her book An African History of Africa, whose title alone suggests that I might be in for a bit of enlightenment. Courtyard Theatre, 11 August, 5:45pm
Andrew O’Hagan I can’t think of any other writer with the chutzpah and the talent to cover a waterfront as wide as the one O’Hagan tackles in his state-of-the-nation blockbuster, Caledonian Road, ranging from Bengali sweatshops in Leicester to oligarchs guzzling £6k bottles of champagne in Pall Mall private clubs. And even if I could, I doubt whether they could talk about it as eloquently. He’s on twice on the same day - talking about comedy in his fiction first, in an event which isn’t Live-streamed, and then interviewed by Andrew Marr, at one that is. Spiegeltent, 13 August, 1:45pm and Venue T, 13 August, 8:30pm *
Olesya Khromeychuk & Andrew Kurkov Between the two O’Hagan events, you can also catch Kurkov, the man habitually referred to as Ukraine’s finest writer, and Khromeychuk, the historian who heads the Ukrainian Institute in London. ‘We need to talk about Ukraine’ says the tagline for the event, and few writers are better placed to help us do so. Courtyard Theatre, 13 August, 4pm
John Vaillant We need to talk about the planet too, and the effects of climate change don’t come more clearly marked than in American-Canadian journalist John Vaillant’s account of the 2016 firestorm that destroyed the Albertan oil town of Fort McMurray, melting concrete, vaporising houses at 900 degrees Centigrade. The book won the most recent Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, a reminder of just what enlightened main sponsors the book festival once used to enjoy. Courtyard Theatre, 24 August, 10.30am
For more information, and to book tickets, visit www.edbookfest.co.uk