Edinburgh International Book Festival 2019 Highlights 24–26 August

Naoise Dolan & Naomi Ishiguro: Growing Pains Every year at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, we celebrate the talent, wit and skill of emerging writers. In this event, we are joined by two of the freshest voices in fiction, whose coming-of-age narratives are by turns tender and cynical in… Laura Bates & Winnie M Li: Misogyny Laid Bare In Winnie M Li’s novel Complicit, a former actress’s experiences at the hands of Hollywood mirror the real violence perpetrated in that arena. Fix the System, Not the Women by Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, unveils the ways in which… Shifting Sands, Five Years On: What Future for the Middle East? In 2015, the acclaimed writer and lawyer Raja Shehadeh was a guest selector for Edinburgh International Book Festival, presenting a series of events exploring the past, present and future of the Middle East. With memories of the region’s 2011 uprisings… Helena Merriman: Undermining the Berlin Wall Many of us remember 1989 and the images of people dancing on the Berlin Wall before it fell. Journalist and broadcaster Helena Merriman has focused on the other end of the Berlin Wall story, the early 1960s when it was first built. Based on her… Tessa Hadley & Charlotte Mendelson: The Process of Revealing In Tessa Hadley’s Free Love, homemaker Phyllis is about to have her neat suburban world blown apart by kissing the son of a friend. In The Exhibitionist, Charlotte Mendelson introduces a family whose patriarch artist prepares for a new exhibition – but… James Kelman (2017 Event) James Kelman, according to Alan Warner, ‘brings alive a human consciousness like no other writer can’. That’s true of his short stories as well as his novels, and is certainly true of his latest collection (his 13th) That Was a Shiver, and Other Stories… Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi: Uganda’s First Woman of Fiction Ugandan short story writer and novelist Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi burst onto the scene when she won The Kwani? Manuscript Project in 2013 with her first novel Kintu. Since then, she’s garnered legions of readers and accolades including a Commonwealth… Kirstin Innes: Who is Clio Campbell? Rarely does a novel set the Scottish literary scene abuzz in the way Scabby Queen has. Sexy rock starlet, veteran political activist, symbol of a nation in decline — who really was Clio Campbell? In Kirstin Innis’s effervescent follow-up to her Not the… Raja Shehadeh: To Absent Fathers In 1985, Raja Shehadeh’s father Aziz was murdered in a pre-meditated knife attack. The circumstances of the crime are the subject of his Strangers in the House. Today, through his new memoir, Shehadeh sheds a different light on the father-son relationship… Liz Lochhead: New and Collected Poems Motherwell-born writer Liz Lochhead presents works spanning a lifetime from her recently published New and Collected Poems. It’s just over 50 years since the publication of her first collection, Memo for Spring, and since then Lochhead has published…