UNBOUND: Five Dials

Sebastian Barry: Tales from an Uncivil War In his beautiful and unforgettable novel Days Without End, Sebastian Barry continued his epic examination of the Irish experience, this time in Midwest America with the story of a recently-emigrated Thomas McNulty and his lover John Cole. Now, with the… Benjamin Labatut & Adrian Nathan West with Jay G Ying Anyone who studied physics at school might remember the mysterious way in which light is said to hover somewhere between wave and particle. In a similar way, according to Philip Pullman, the thrilling new work by Benjamin Labatut hovers somewhere between… Edinburgh International Book Festival 2019 Highlights 24–26 August In the final days of another fantastic Book Festival we saw authors including Mary Robinson, Cressida Cowell, Colson Whitehead and more… Devi Sridhar: How to Prevent (Another) Pandemic As both chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh and a highly effective social media communicator, Professor Devi Sridhar became an invaluable resource for many in the early days of the pandemic, and a household name across the country… Jeff VanderMeer: The End of All Things? When he first came to Edinburgh some years ago to discuss his speculative eco thriller Annihilation, we suspected that Jeff VanderMeer would become one of the best-respected science fiction authors of his age. What we didn’t realise was that Cli-Fi… Malala Yousafzai (2014 event) Inspirational education activist and Pakistani school pupil, Malala Yousafzai came to the Edinburgh International Book Festival to talk to a packed theatre full of teenagers.  … Amin Maalouf & Jonathan Sacks: Rediscovering Our Moral Compass How can we rediscover human solidarity when the world feels like it has lost its way? The European Union is under extreme strain, the US has lost its moral credibility, and the world is so divided that it seems unable to address global threats to the… 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… Leah Cowan, Julián Fuks & Abbas Nazari: Surviving Hostile Environments Detained, fingerprinted, treated with hostility. These are some of the words used recently by EU citizens seeking entry into the UK. How do Britain’s borders reflect the government’s Hostile Environment policy, and how does its border regime link with… Maggie O'Farrell: Loves, Labours, Loss Edinburgh-based Maggie O’Farrell hit a spectacular new career high last year with the publication of Hamnet – winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, a huge bestseller across the world and unquestionably a standout book of 2020. Why did O’Farrell’s novel…