Interview - Bonnie Greer (2014)

Ambrose Parry (Chris Brookmye & Marisa Haetzman) at the Edinburgh International Book Festival Crime-writing duo Chris Brookmyre and Marisa Haetzman introduced the shadowy streets of 1840s Edinburgh in The Way of All Flesh last year. In this event filmed live at the 2019 Edinburgh International Book Festival they launch the sequel, The Art of Dying… Abi Morgan: For Love Nor Pity One of the UK’s most fearsomely talented screenwriters, Abi Morgan has worked on projects including The Iron Lady and Shame, which garnered both headlines and awards. Today, she reveals her own powerful story of survival. In This is Not a Pity Memoir… A L Kennedy: We Are Not Dead Yet A L Kennedy’s insightful and piercing gaze, evident in all her books, is probably at its most unflinching in her short stories. We are thrilled to welcome her back to the Book Festival with her short story collection We Are Attempting to Survive Our Time… William Dalrymple with Fergal Keane: Rapacity and Excess in Imperial India In the hands of William Dalrymple, history becomes a rip-roaring, rollicking adventure; the reader embarking on a visceral odyssey into the subject thanks to Dalrymple’s glorious gift for storytelling and his eye for detail. In The Anarchy, the… Jo Hunter & John Loughton: Power to the People When Jo Hunter established 64 Million Artists, an organisation that aims to encourage everybody in the UK to discover their creativity, little did she know that in 2020 she would have to dramatically change the way they reached people. The ‘COVID-19 pivot’… Reading Scotland: Graeme Armstrong, Welcome tae Airdrie In the former industrial heartlands of North Lanarkshire, Graeme Armstrong’s urgent debut novel The Young Team pulls back the curtain on the lives of young men as they navigate the friendship, turf wars and stereotypes of Scottish masculinity. Based on… Viet Thanh Nguyen: Through the Eyes of a Vietnamese Refugee In 1975, at the age of four, Viet Thanh Nguyen fled from Vietnam with his family. Like so many others, these refugees from their war-torn country ended up in America. Fortunately, Nguyen is blessed with a stellar command of the written word and has… Kit de Waal: Scenes from an Unpredictable Childhood Kit de Waal’s influence across contemporary British literature is so broad as to be almost immeasurable. So how is it that one of our titans of the written word grew up with only the Bible to read? De Waal comes to this year’s Festival to chat about a… Kathryn Briggs: Art and Resistance Kathryn Briggs is an internationally recognised, award-winning graphic novelist, zine creator, arts educator and independent publisher. Her short comics have been featured in anthologies including Treehouse Comic, Dirty Rotten Comics, Meanwhile…, and… Karl Ove Knausgaard: The Familiar Made Strange My Struggle was the six-volume autofictional project that established Karl Ove Knausgaard among the world’s most respected writers. Now, the Norwegian author embarks on a new literary odyssey. The Morning Star is a novel steeped in the uncanny, haunted by…