Amid concerns that she would be unable to leave Egypt due to the current political situation, eminent Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif has confirmed that she will be appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in August.
Soueif will speak on Saturday 18 August about her memoir, Cairo: My City, Our Revolution, which charts her personal experiences of the uprising as it ignited in Tahrir Square last year.
In addition she will deliver the opening address at the Edinburgh World Writers’ Conference 2012-2013, one of the highlights of this year’s Book Festival. In a public discussion chaired by leading Turkish author Elif Shafak, Soueif will address whether literature should be political.
Renowned science fiction and fantasy writer, China Miéville, will deliver the final keynote speech of the Writers’ Conference, on Tuesday 21 August, when he discusses the Future of the Novel in an event chaired by Janne Teller.
The Edinburgh World Writers’ Conference is an ambitious programming partnership between the Edinburgh International Book Festival and the British Council comprising of a series of discussions which will take place from 17 to 21 August stimulating a debate which will reverberate around the world.
Professor Peter Higgs event
The Book festival also recently announced that Edinburgh University Professor Peter Higgs, of Higgs boson fame, will join Frank Close in an event next month.
The event comes hot on the heels of the announcement by physicists at CERN that they may have discovered the so called God Particle. Higgs, professor emeritus at the University of Edinburgh, first identified the concept of the Higgs Boson in the 1960s.
This will be the first time the pair will appear together at a public event since the announcement of the breakthrough discovery at the Large Hadron Collider earlier this month.
Close will discuss his latest book, The Infinity Puzzle, chronicling the events that led to the world’s most expensive experiment and the race to understand quantum field theory. In the event, which will be chaired by Higgs, Close will describe the personalities, the intense competition, the dead ends, the high politics and the unsung heroes which have led to this remarkable discovery.
Among the line-up of scientists appearing at the book festival is former Labour Environment Minister Michael Meacher who will tackle the very notion of existence with his latest book Destination of the Species, asking if there is a purpose behind the universe, or whether we live in a mechanistic sphere driven by blind natural forces?
Alistair Moffat will present the findings of his Scotland’s DNA Project, having tracked the genetic history of over 2,000 participants, piecing together the mosaic of Scotland’s identity.
Participating in a debate looking at how genetics are shaped by our social and physical environment will be Dr Nessa Carey, author of The Epigenetics Revolution, Dr Paul Shiels, from Glasgow University’s Institute of Cancer Sciences, and Professor Steve Yearley from Edinburgh’s Genomics Forum.
Internationally acclaimed science writer Lone Frank will provide an intimate and, at times, personal account into the new science of consumer-led genomics, pondering the consequences of biological fortune-telling, and uncovering just how much our environment will matter in a new genetic driven era.
Top biochemist Chris Cooper will look at the science behind drugs in sport with Run, Swim, Throw, Cheat, whilst Frank Westerman will examine selective breeding and eugenics with his new history of the Lippizaner horses from the Austro Hungarian empire to the Second World War.