Edinburgh Book Festival

The temporary, tented village at Charlotte Square's Georgian garden, in the heart of Edinburgh's New Town, is the venue for the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

For the final Fine Fiction writer's event at the Edinburgh Book Festival it was the award winning, Edinburgh-born and educated literary novelist Candia McWilliam. She is in conversation with Jenny Brown, the first director of the Edinburgh Book Festival.  Candia unfortunately has been through the wars in recent years: at previous Festival "meet the author" sessions she has had the opportunity to bare her soul and confess heartfelt stories about family life, guilt, alcohol and serious illness, experiences she writes about in poetry, fiction and memoir.

Two crime thriller writers were brought together for this discussion on their latest novels, The Stranger from Home and Home Before Dark respectively.  The event was chaired by Lin Anderson who is also a crime writer. (Her new thriller about forensic scientist Rhona McLeod is Final Cut.)

It's always interesting to watch idealism encounter pragmatism - especially when one considers "pragmatism" has an older meaning than that purveyed by politicians, one encompassing practical, purposeful love for one's fellow humans.

Generation X author Douglas Coupland was last in Scotland for the Edinburgh Book Festival in 2004, and this time he was back sporting a greyish beard and a new novel titled Generation A, as well as his trademark ironic, yet incredibly sincere and honest, sparkle in his eyes.

In 1978 Susie Orbach, a psychotherapist, wrote her first book "Fat is a Feminist Issue," (FIFI), a self help guide to losing weight without dieting. Thirty years later, our society in the western world appears to be divided into the overweight and obese contrasting with the compulsive need for young girls to be size zero.

Ruth Wishart is undoubtedly A Good Thing (to borrow Sellers and Yeatman's phrase of approval), and it was certainly a good thing she was Chair of the lively debate that led on from the observations of Henry McLeish, Tom Brown,

Keith Charteris. speaking at the Edinburgh Book Festival,  has considerable experience in self-publishing - he now has a publishing house - Strident Publishing to prove it. Although Strident Publishing's interests lie in the teenage and "reluctant reader" markets, the advice Charteris offered applies equally to all those contemplating the arduous route toward a self-published book. Is the notion sanity or vanity?

The death of Robin Jenkins robbed us of a highly distinctive voice in Scottish literature, one whose considerable contribution it's perhaps too early to fully measure.

As Political Editor for BBC Scotland, Brian Taylor is probably used to a bit of crowd-control. Not that his three guests, Professor Robert Crawford, Andy Hall, or Dr. Donald Smith intended mischief. But their obvious enthusiasm for and delight in Robert Burns, man and work carried them along, and the audience in the Highland Park Spiegeltent went with them all the way.

Paddy Ashdown fair packed them in to the RBS Main Theatre at Charlotte Square Gardens, cheering possibly for the Liberal Democratic Party, but certainly for an author on his sixth book, which he assured his audience didn't become a political story till page 192.

During this year's Edinburgh Book Festival, Alexander McCall Smith is taking part in no less than four events for both adults and children.  He is a prolific writer with millions of readers world wide who follow his various popular series of novels set in Edinburgh, Botswana and London.

"Is blogging an art?" was the question this reviewer was asked as he picked up his ticket for what turned out to be one of the most interesting and lively events of the Edinburgh International Book Festival thus far. The answer is that, yes Claudia, it probably is.

William McIlvanney remains one of Scotland's best-loved and widely read authors, testified by the near-full RBS Main Theatre for a BBC Scotland Radio Café interview with Stuart Kelly.

We westerners have trouble with Russians. Watching the wealthy elite acquiring voraciously over here we assume that theirs is a country clamouring to ape what passes for our capitalist prosperity.

Henning Mankell is a prime example of ‘homo narrans’, the storytelling animal. With a totally sold out RBS Main Theatre at the Book Festival, he is also a very popular author, who has written 40 novels and 25 plays, and given the world Wallander, the grumpy policeman from Ystad.

This reviewer has sometimes imagined a memoir of his time with this website, its title? "Scribbling In The Dark" - a small homage to the late E.P. Thomson's "Writing By Candlelight".

Margaret Drabble is one of Britain's most celebrated novelists and biographers, whose first novel was the Summer Bird Cage in 1963. She has won many literary awards over the years not least the honour of Dame Commander of the British Empire in 2008.  A prestigious role in recent years was Editor of the Oxford Companion to English Literature. Her latest book is called "The Pattern in the Carpet - a personal history with Jigsaws".

In similar vein to J K Rowling, best selling novelist Kate Atkinson is an adopted Scottish writer, having been brought up in Yorkshire, but for many years she has lived in Edinburgh. Well, this is such a rich, inspiring literary city.

The Scottish Power Studio Theatre in Charlotte Square Garden was almost full for this event, with a largely female audience, few of whom appeared to be Muslim. Given the tone and attitude of some of the post-talk questions, this was both understandable and a pity. Professor Carole Hillenbrand is a formidable scholar, although, as this reviewer knows from past experience, not always an engaging speaker. Which was a pity, given the non-specialist audience she and Yasmin Hai were addressing.