John O'Donoghue

Maggie O'Farrell: Giving New Life to Shakespeare’s Son (2020 Event) Surely Maggie O’Farrell’s most accomplished novel to date, Hamnet centres around the emotional life of a deeply intuitive woman, charting the terrain of her grief at the loss of a child. Join the Edinburgh-based writer as she discusses her latest… Charles Fernyhough and Ben Marcus (2012 event) From Gulliver’s Travels to 1984, dystopian visions have shaped literary fiction. Why do these flights of fancy influence our reality?… Michèle Roberts & Helen Simpson (2010 event) Two remarkable writers led an exceptional Book Festival event in 2010. Joined by chair Steven Gale, Michèle Roberts and Helen Simpson discussed their sharp and moving short story collections to great effect… Henning Mankell The Swedish literary all-rounder chats about his varied writing career after his sold-out 2009 Book Festival event. Find out how living half the year in Africa and the other half in Sweden has affected his outlook on life… Andrew O'Hagan (2017 Event) In this keynote lecture recorded live at the 2017 Edinburgh International Book Festival, the country’s foremost essayist and one of our most astute commentators, Andrew O’Hagan, speaks for the first time on the future of Scotland and seeks to define this… Mike Berners-Lee at the Edinburgh International Book Festival Warnings of looming environmental catastrophe rain down on us with increasing frequency, and only the most ardent climate change sceptics deny we live at a crucial point for the Earth's future. Join sustainability expert Mike Berners-Lee in a live… Serhii Plokhy at the Edinburgh International Book Festival ‘Heartbreaking stories of heroism’ set against a backdrop of ‘political cynicism and scientific ignorance'. That’s how judges described the winner of 2018's Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction – Serhii Plokhy’s Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy. The… Jesse Jackson (2015 Event) One of the best-respected and most formidable civil rights activists of the 20th century, the Reverend Jesse Jackson worked for Martin Luther King in the 1960s… Hilary Mantel (2012 event) The first woman to win the Booker twice talks to James Runcie about her work in this event, recorded live at the 2012 Edinburgh Intenational Book Festival… Prue Leith at the Edinburgh International Book Festival If The Great British Bake Off is your first encounter with Prue Leith, you’ve missed a great deal. Founder of Leith’s School of Food and Wine, restaurateur, journalist, novelist and now TV judge – she is one of the nation’s most respected foodies…