After an unusually quiet summer last year, the Festival City is back. Well, sort of. With only 340 Fringe shows compared to 2019’s smorgasbord of 3,841 plays, stand up, musicals and one woman shows a la Fleabag, we’re not back to full strength but there’s still plenty of things to do and see.
The Edinburgh International Book Festival opens for bookings today, so if you fancy getting some culture on then check out their fantastic, diverse selection of offerings.
The organisers explain "We’re staging a hybrid Book Festival in 2021 – a fabulous online programme of over 250 events for adults and children, streamed live on the website. Alongside, we will welcome in-person audiences for a wide range of the events in the programme, which you can book here on the website. This year’s Book Festival will take place from Saturday 14 to Monday 30 August at our new Festival home: the University of Edinburgh’s Edinburgh College of Art."
The overall theme for this year’s Book Festival is Onwards and Upwards, but individual programming strands each have a more specific focus. From A Planet in Crisis: Ideas for Action and Blood Legacies: Confronting our Colonial Past to wisdom from great writers and the stories Scotland tells itself , there’s a dizzying array of ideas and authors on display.
Highlights include Kazuo Ishiguru, Torrey Peters, Val McDermid and former Prime Minister Gordon Brown along with Edinburgh-based talent like Helen McClory and Harry Josephine Giles.
All bookings take place on the website this year and, and the EIBF team have provided a handy guide to making sure you have your digital tickets. The website notes that “for the first few days of sale, in-person tickets are limited to 2 per event (5 for children’s events) per booker for a max of 5 events."
Bookings open at 12 noon and you need to register or sign in on the website and you can choose your events from their programme. Since it’s likely to be busy, you’ll be put in a queue - the EIBF is a wildly popular event at the best of times (which, let’s face it, this isn’t) so events are likely to sell out quickly. If you don’t get what you were hoping for, why not take a punt on an author you’re less familiar with, or one of this year’s debuts so when they hit the big time you can say you saw them when...
And if you can’t make any of this year’s events, why not check out their archived interviews from previous festivals ?
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