7 highlights: Edinburgh Book Festival
With appearances from crime writing royalty and Traitors stars, here are our top festival picks
Ali Smith
A companion work to 2025’s Gliff, this year’s Glyph is just another piece of evidence to suggest that the Invernesian is Scotland’s greatest living author. She discusses how words can help us get through the dark days.
Edinburgh Futures Institute, 29 August, 11.45am.
Matt Haig
We’d all love to go back and make amends to a person or relive an event to do it differently. Haig makes those things real in his literature and The Midnight Train is his latest heartbreaking/cockle-warming tome.
Edinburgh Futures Institute, 27 August, 6.45pm.
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Paterson Joseph & David Olusoga
Black British history comes under the spotlight here as historian Olusoga and actor Joseph discuss some figures from the past who have been neglected and ignored.
Edinburgh Futures Institute, 23 August, 10am.
David Keenan
Weaver of hallucinatory narratives, the writer of This Is Memorial Device struck gold again this year with Boyhood, a story about Glasgow, grief, Greek and grit which we described in our review as a ‘a maximalist time-slipping odyssey’.
Edinburgh Futures Institute, 21 August, 6.45pm.
Darren McGarvey
The writer and activist also known as Loki talks about his latest book, Trauma Industrial Complex, which considers how the cult of oversharing has become a tool of capitalism.
Edinburgh Futures Institute, 20 August, 8.30pm.
John Grisham
Just the 500 million books sold, then, is it? The author of The Client and The Rainmaker chats with another crime writer who knows a thing or two about shifting units, our very own Ian Rankin.
McEwan Hall, 25 August, 7pm.
Fatima Bhutto & Ayşegül Savaş
These writers are linked by major life developments and experiences which led to them renewing themselves afresh. In an event chaired by Octavia Bright, they share an honest discussion of the roads they had to take.
Edinburgh Futures Institute, 28 August, 3.15pm.