Aside from his Charlotte Square appearance, David Simon will also be presenting a masterclass as part of the Edinburgh International Television Festival. Yet, there are many more out there in Festival city who would love to get a chance to hear from the man behind ‘the greatest TV show ever made’. Stage performers will surely stand in awe of his modern American television epic The Wire, which welds the best characteristics of cinema and novelised storytelling over five seasons in exploring the machinery of the modern US city.

As well as their other series, Generation Kill (set in Iraq) and the forthcoming Treme (which makes the hurricane-devastated New Orleans a microcosm of American society), Simon and partner Ed Burns also collaborated on the book of The Corner, the follow-up to Simon’s Homicide, both of which are expansive volumes of narrative reportage set in the pair’s native Baltimore and recently reissued in the UK by Canongate.

Here, Simon may be expected to talk about his work, but also about the challenges which face the various media he has experience of. An erudite talker and former crime writer with the Baltimore Sun, he recently gave testimony to a Senate Committee on the future of journalism and is equally passionate on the workings of television in interview. Here is a man, after all, whose motto while writing The Wire was ‘fuck the average viewer’.

Charlotte Square Gardens, 0845 373 588829 Aug, 8pm, £9 (£7).