Yesterday the organisers at the book festival told us where the audiences have come from so far. This is the beauty of the online festival, that everyone can join in from wherever they are.
Today the James Tait Black Prizes will be announced at an event which you can only watch live introduced by Sally Magnusson.
On the 2020 fiction shortlist is Lucy Ellmann with her novel Ducks, Newburyport, Helon Habila with Travellers, Sarah Hall with Sudden Traveller and Edna O’Brien with her novel Girl. Authors on the biography shortlist are Carolyn Forché with her memoir What You Have Heard is True, Sinéad Gleeson with Constellations, Saidiya Hartman with Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments and George Szirtes with The Photographer at Sixteen.
Past winners include Zadie Smith for White Teeth and Beryl Bainbridge for Master Georgie, so the winner this year will join an illustrious group.
Programme for today: Friday 21 August
9:30am Drawalong with Kate McLelland Facebook @edbookfest
10:00am Pony Pals with Kate McLelland
To watch this event – click here
11:30am Wanjiru Koinange & Donna Obaseki-Ogunnaike: Outriders Africa – Sub-Saharan Swiping
This is an audio event – to listen click here
1:00pm Writing Wrongs: Voices from the Queer Arab Vanguard
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2:30pm James Tait Black Prizes
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Please note this event will NOT be available on demand
4:00pm Kirstin Innes: Who is Clio Campbell?
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5:30pm Alain Mabanckou: Rewriting the Congolese Story
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7:00pm Lola Olufemi & Minna Salami: Critical Reflections on Feminism
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8:30pm Frans Timmermans with Gordon Brown: The Way Forward for Europe
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Programme for tomorrow: Saturday 22 August
9:30am Drawalong with Dapo Adeola Facebook @edbookfest
10:00am Why Plastic isn’t Fantastic: Dapo Adeola & Nathan Bryon
CLEAN UP! is the sequel to LOOK UP!, Sainsbury’s Children’s Book Award and Foyles Book of the Year shortlisted debut from Nathan Bryon and Dapo Adeola. Get a peek behind the scenes as Dapo and Nathan ask each other questions about how they met and came to make the books, plus enjoy an exclusive reading of CLEAN UP!.
This event is part of the Baillie Gifford Children’s Programme
To watch this event – click here
11:30am Liz Hyder: In the Jaws of Bearmouth
Liz Hyder’s multi award-winning debut Bearmouth is a novel so utterly original it swallows you up entirely and spits you out feeling bereft. Dark and distinctive, Bearmouth explores ideas around oppression, autonomy, gender and religion while Newt’s voice is so powerful it will echo in the chambers of your mind long after you finish reading.
This event is part of the Baillie Gifford Children’s Programme
To watch this event – click here
1:00pm Fire Front: First Nations Poetry and Power
Fire Front: First Nations Poetry and Power Today is a new anthology curated by Gomeroi poet and academic Alison Whittaker. It is, as Whittaker says in her introduction, ‘fifty-three poems fuelling, making space for, depriving, reshaping, undermining and doing power in every way. What they have in common is why they do it: for the emancipation of First Nations.’ Join Whittaker and a selection of some of the poets who appear in the book – including Ellen van Neerven, Ancestress, Uncle Jim Everett, Meleika Gesa-Fatafehi, Declan Furber Gillick, Evelyn Araluen and Laniyuk – for readings and discussions that throw down a challenge to what contributor Bruce Pascoe calls ‘the tea-cosy nature of Australian comfort.’
To watch this event –click here
2:30pm Sophie Hughes & Fernanda Melchor: Another Mexico
Celebrated Mexican author Fernanda Melchor’s first book translated into English, Hurricane Season, has been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. The author and her translator Sophie Hughes come together with poet Juana Adcock to discuss these unavoidable darknesses, and share the processes — limitations, challenges and delights — of translating such a layered, densely playful work as Hurricane Season. Brutal, unflinching, depraved and profane, this is a story of small towns and violence, claustrophobia and rage. Unique and unforgettable.
This event is supported by the 2020 International Booker Prize
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4:00pm Cassandra Clare: All that Glitters is Not Gold
Cassandra Clare is the phenomenally successful author of internationally bestselling series The Mortal Instruments, The Infernal Devices, The Bane Chronicles and The Dark Artifices, and she joins us to talk about Chain of Gold, the first novel in her brand-new trilogy The Last Hours.
This event is part of the Baillie Gifford Children’s Programme
Please note this event will NOT be available On Demand
To watch this event – click here
5.30pm Isabel Wilkerson: America’s Unspoken Caste System
As America seemingly implodes its way toward the 2020 election, pundits and political classes continue to try to understand how the Land of the Free has found itself in such disarray. And — as it has throughout Western democracies — the conversation inevitably turns to shifting facets of identity politics. Wilkerson has turned her celebrated journalistic eye to what she describes as the unspoken system of power and control that underpins American society: caste.
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7:00pm Edwidge Danticat: ‘Death Cannot Write Its Own Story’
Everything Inside is Edwidge Danticat’s twenty-first book, and once again confirms her as an essential voice in world literature. Across her generous and imaginative oeuvre, Danticat has written with urgency and deep compassion. Searingly insightful and deeply humane, Danticat reflects on an astonishing career in words – from lyric fiction and forensic essays, to stories for children and young people – with British-Pakistani author Kamila Shamsie.
Please note this event will NOT be available On Demand
To watch this event – click here
8:30pm Bernardine Evaristo with Nicola Sturgeon: The Triumph of Girl, Woman, Other
Following her Booker Prize win last November, Bernardine Evaristo’s writing has won deserved and long-overdue acclaim across the globe. Girl, Woman, Other charts the intersecting lives of twelve characters, from a teenager working in a supermarket to a sixty-something playwright facing a career-defining moment. It is a sophisticated novel that – among other things – illuminates the complex forms discrimination can take. Evaristo discusses her work and ideas with Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon.
This event is sponsored by the Open University
To watch this event – click here
Founding Editor of The Edinburgh Reporter.
Edinburgh-born multimedia journalist and iPhoneographer.
