Saturday 11

Candia McWilliam
Highland Park Spiegeltent 10.15am
The Scottish artist and critic opens the festival, sharing her commitment to the transforming power of literature.

Hamida Ghafour
Peppers Theatre 11am
A journalist offers insight into people and ideologies in Afghanistan. In The Sleeping Buddha she returns to her birthplace.

William Dalrymple
RBS Main Theatre 11.30am
Launching one of the festival’s themes: a focus on India. The writer talks about the impact of the siege of Delhi.

Alan Bennett
RBS Main Theatre 3pm
In Bennett’s most recent novel, The Uncommon Reader, the Queen discovers literature, with surprising results.

Yasmina Khadra
Peppers Theatre 4pm
Set in Tel Aviv, The Attack assesses the motives of a woman suicide bomber. The author is a former Algerian soldier who found success after taking a female pen name.

Jackie Kay
ScottishPower Studio Theatre 5pm
Hear poetry, stories and some of the writer’s work on slavery. Kay’s appearance is chaired by Janice Forsyth, of BBC Radio Scotland’s The Radio Café.

Will Self
RBS Main Theatre 6.30pm
In 1946 George Orwell retreated to the Isle of Jura to write Nineteen Eighty-Four. Self and Philip Gourevitch, editor of the Paris Review, follow in his footsteps.

Sunday 12

Nicholas Ostler
Peppers Theatre 4pm
The story of Latin is the story of Western culture. Ostler’s book, Ad Infinitum, is a biography of the language whose influence is still all around us.

Norman Mailer live from the US
RBS Main Theatre 4.30pm
Andrew O’Hagan will interview the titan of American letters via videolink. Mailer will then use a LongPen (a gadget invented by Margaret Atwood) to sign a limited number of books for festival-goers live in Scotland.

Rachel Seiffert and Erica Wagner
Peppers Theatre 7pm
Seiffert writes about a couple’s burden of secrets in Afterwards, and Wagner, The Times literary editor, creates a tale of loss, longing and incest in Seizure.

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