Edinburgh International Book Festival

Marian Keyes didn’t start writing until her twenties, she felt that she was ‘all washed up at 30.’ But readers have had a love affair with Keyes that has lasted over two decades now.

It’s hard to imagine a greater, more reliable comfort than a new book by Marian Keyes landing solidly in your lap, promising all the qualities that have come to define her work: complicated family dynamics, bountiful quantities of laughter, skeletons in the closet and uncomfortable moments of truth that lie close to the bone. Her latest, Grown Ups, centres around Cara Casey, who after a bang on the head finds herself incapable of keeping mum on the family secrets.

With more than 35 million copies sold of her 13 novels to date, Keyes’s own brand of irrepressible, generous, hilarious storytelling goes from strength to strength. Join Keyes and writer Jenny Colgan for an hour of unforgettable grown-up fun in this event recorded live at the 2020 Book Festival.

‘You were always sitting in character, you were just never sure which one.’ So says Norah to the memory of her mother in Actress, the new novel by Anne Enright. The mother in question is Katherine O’Dell, who died aged 58 – the same age Norah has now reached.

Actress is a portrait of life in the theatre, of one woman’s rise to fame and her subsequent decline, with all the challenges that women on stage faced in the years before the #MeToo movement shone light on them. But this novel is also a tender examination of the relationship between mother and daughter – the reconstruction of an emotional landscape in which fame has left a trail of newspaper articles, photographs and public performances.

For this event, recorded live at the 2020 Book Festival, the Booker Prize-winning novelist is joined by Vicky Featherstone, Artistic Director of the Royal Court Theatre and the first Artistic Director of the National Theatre of Scotland, to discuss this sensitive portrayal of a life lived in the spotlight.

While the Summer of Love is about to unfold across the Atlantic, life in 1967 isn’t so easy for a young would-be musician in London’s shabby Charing Cross Road. Yet from this modest starting point, David Mitchell builds a joyful fictional biography of a band that will take the world by storm. Utopia Avenue is the finest prog-folk band you have never heard of, and the novel of the same name is a stylish romp through the rags-to-riches lives of drummer Griff, singer Elf, guitarist Jasper and bass player Dean.

Organised around the song titles of the band’s albums, Utopia Avenue'sclever structure also gives it a powerful narrative drive – with added zest from a series of cheeky cameo appearances by real-life rock legends including David Bowie and Leonard Cohen.

Funny, whip-smart and occasionally veering into the fantastical, it is one of the most compellingly entertaining reads of 2020. Join Mitchell in this event recorded live at the 2020 Book Festival as he shares his notes with folk singer and musician Sam Amidon, who also plays some of his most recent music.

Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency is more than just a collection of Olivia Laing’s essays over decades. Ranging from interviews and profiles to reflections and confessionals, Laing’s characteristic generosity of spirit and optimism of purpose inspires hope in the midst of the unsettling weather of the present emergency.

But this book is also a manifesto for the power, the value and the need for art: ‘Art is… political in the sense of being available as a tool for protest and activism… but it’s also political in that it continually offers new perspectives, new ways of seeing, other consciousnesses with which to view reality.’

With Fiona Bradley, Director of the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, Laing unpacks our political, emotional and creative selves in this event recorded live at the 2020 Book Festival, drawing us in to her career-spanning conversations with art, with artists, and with herself.

2020 was, without doubt, a banner year for challenging our understanding of what constitutes a global problem and how equipped we are to address that task collectively. At the start of that year — what feels like an age ago — after generations of scientific findings and urgent calls to action, a unified, collective response to the global climate crisis remained elusive. But there were some green shoots of hope.

Late in 2019, the European Commission announced the formation of the European Green Deal, a body that Commission President Ursula von der Leyen declared was Europe’s ‘Man on the Moon moment’: a plan to make Europe the first climate-neutral continent. Dutch politician and diplomat Frans Timmermans was named Executive Vice-President for the project and planning, and began negotiating with vigour. Then the pandemic hit.

In this special conversation recorded live at the 2020 Edinburgh International Book Festival, Timmermans sits down with former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown to discuss the politics of environmental change. How much action is needed for meaningful change? What are the roadblocks to genuinely ending Europe’s dependence on fossil fuels? And what does a green recovery from COVID-19 look like?

As a war correspondent in the Balkans, through to her time as senior policy advisor to Barack Obama, and her appointment in 2013 as US Ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power has spent her career committed to resolving international conflict and protecting human dignity.

In her intimate and candid memoir, Education of an Idealist, Power offers an urgent response to the pressing question of our times, ‘What can one person do?’.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and Professor of Human Rights talks with Allan Little in our annual Frederick Hood Memorial Lecture, recorded live at the 2020 Book Festival.

‘Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.’ So said Abraham Lincoln in one of his rousing speeches, but it is a sentiment that could come straight out of the playbook of popular Dutch historian Rutger Bregman.

Bregman's compelling ‘hopeful history,’ Humankind, is a bracingly optimistic account of human nature. Essentially, in his view, the vast majority of people are pretty decent. He contrasts this idea with biologist Frans de Waal’s ‘veneer theory’ which posits that beneath a thin skin of human decency, there’s a savage waiting to burst forth.

Superbly readable and full of fascinating evidence, Bregman’s book also looks at how his optimistic analysis of human nature could play out in policy terms. Hyper-local participatory democracy? Schools with little or no curriculum? A change to the tough treatment of people serving time in prisons? In this event recorded live at the 2020 Book Festival, Bregman shares his invigorating thesis with Lee Randall.

Earmarked as ‘the voice of our communal consciousness’ by Edinburgh International Book Festival’s 2018 Guest Selector Afua Hirsch, it’s hard to believe that Roger Robinson hasn’t been a staple of British public life since time immemorial.

A fixture of the UK spoken word scene for many years, Robinson rocketed to national prominence in 2019 when his third poetry collection, A Portable Paradise, bagged the prestigious T S Eliot Prize.

Firmly rooted in the dub poetry tradition of his Trinidadian heritage, Robinson’s plain-speaking, fizzy, often joyous verse journeys through our contemporary preoccupations with a seasoned insight few could replicate. From the ongoing injustices of Grenfell to the pains and pleasures of family life, he unpacks the cosmos of ideas that make up A Portable Paradise with fellow poet Kei Miller in this event recorded for the 2020 Book Festival.

With Val McDermid’s iconic detective soon set to hit our screens, it couldn’t be a more perfect time to revisit Police Scotland's Historic Cases Unit and the savvy, no-nonsense DCI Karen Pirie.

A thrilling new head-scratcher from the undisputed ‘Queen of Crime,’ Still Life sees the much-loved detective inspector confronted by a decade-old cold case, drawing her into a historical cover-up that someone would do anything to keep under wraps. With all the dizzying narrative trickery and canny characterisation we’ve come to expect from one of our finest literary minds, this sixth instalment in the bestselling series is Val McDermid at the top of her game.

Inspired in part by the wildly popular Portrait Artist of the Year competition, the ever-inventive author teases the mysterious connection between Still Life and the Sky Arts series in a conversation with one of its widely-admired presenters, Dame Joan Bakewell, recorded live at the 2020 Book Festival.

‘Life is just a party, and parties weren’t meant to last.’ The post-punk protagonists of Andrew O’Hagan’s Mayflies would probably describe the lyrics of Prince’s hit pop song 1999 as ‘Yankee pish,’ but O’Hagan’s novel catches exactly the mood of the song. The ephemeral nature of life, burning brightly and then so soon extinguished, lies at the heart of this soulful story of two lads from small-town Scotland.

Tully and James are growing up in Irvine, steeped in the music of the Fire Engines, the Fall and the poetry of John Cooper Clarke. Together they rush towards the climax of their youth in an unforgettable, friendship-defining weekend in Manchester. Thirty years later, Tully calls his old pal with some troubling news.

The fine grain of working-class teenagers’s lives; the blether, the binge-drinking and nights on the pull: Mayflies sees Andrew O’Hagan in scintillating, heartbreakingly good form. He talks with fellow Scottish writer, columnist and doyen of the literary salon, Damian Barr in this event recorded live at the 2020 Book Festival.