Interview - Leigh and Maureen (2014)

Pussy Riot's Maria Alyokhina with Yanis Varoufakis (2018 Event) 'To back down an inch is to give up a mile,' says Maria Alyokhina in Riot Days, her account of Pussy Riot’s extraordinary rise to infamy in 2012. Following an iconoclastic balaclava-clad performance in a Moscow cathedral, Alyokhina and two of her… Ma Jian talks to André Naffis-Sahely at the Edinburgh International Book Festival Exile in London hasn’t dulled Chinese author Ma Jian’s anger at the state which permanently banned his work over 30 years ago. His biting satire China Dream takes aim at Xi Jinping’s regime and the mistruths told by the Communist Party today, centring on… Michael Pedersen presents Good Grief! Come bask in the company of your favourite ghosts at the Good Grief! Salon – where the grief comes glittered, gritty and gutsy. We have all lost something over ‘The Big Still’, this last weird epoch of living, be it: time, trips, tips, friends, cash… Lucy Caldwell & Louise Kennedy: Belfast in the Blood Meet two authors of novels about life in an extraordinary city. In Lucy Caldwell’s These Days, it’s 1941 and Belfast has escaped the worst of the war, until the Blitz brings devastation. Now, two sisters must find a way to carry on. Louise Kennedy’s… Linn Ullmann: Portrait of a Family ‘I was his child and her child, but not their child,’ Linn Ullmann writes in Unquiet, ‘it was never us three.’ This sense of dispossession and longing haunt the pages of the Norwegian literary star’s elusive, quietly devastating novel; the story of a… John Boyne & Simon Mayo (2016 Event) We were delighted to welcome John Boyne with his latest novel The Boy at the Top of the Mountain and Simon Mayo with Blame back to Charlotte Square Gardens. In this event, filmed live at the 2016 Edinburgh International Book Festival, they examine ideas… David Crystal (2015 Event) A linguist and an expert on the development of the English language, David Crystal presents two books that tell us a great deal about English as it is spoken in the 21st century. You Say Potato looks at accents and our different ideas about ‘correct&… The New York Times Book Review Live There is an intimacy to reading: it’s just us and the author; our subjective response and their generous, imaginative understanding of a world that we share but may struggle to articulate. Yet for book lovers, there are moments beyond that connection… Gulbahar Haitiwaji: To Make Us Slowly Disappear This is one Uyghur woman’s astonishing story of survival. More than a million Uyghur Muslims are incarcerated in Chinese detention units: China describes them as re-education camps while human rights organisations accuse China of genocide. Gulbahar… Isabel Wilkerson: America’s Unspoken Caste System As America seemingly implodes its way toward the 2020 election, pundits and political classes continue to try to understand how the Land of the Free has found itself in such disarray. And — as it has throughout Western democracies — the conversation…