Big-hitters promise dazzling chapter for the Book Festival

THE Edinburgh International Book Festival sets itself a hard task each year. Billing itself as the world's biggest event of its kind, it has to come up with a correspondingly star-studded list of headlining names - and with only so many to choose from in the book world, that gets ever harder.

But Festival director Catherine Lockerbie and her team can pat themselves on the back this year. Launched this week, the 2005 programme has an impressive range of international big-hitters, as well as a high count of familiar names from politics and the media, that are guaranteed to bring in the crowds.

Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood top the bill. Rushdie can afford to be less reclusive now the fatwah against him has been lifted, but security fears will always dog him. The publication this summer of his new novel Shalimar The Clown prompts his visit to Edinburgh, and is his first new novel since Fury four years ago - a book that divided the critics. His Festival appearance on August 27 will be a compelling event in every sense.

Margaret Atwood appears on the same day, just before Rushdie - not to launch a new work but to talk about Curious Pursuits, her collected journalism. Next morning she returns to read fiction and poetry, and in the afternoon Zadie Smith offers a preview of her new novel On Beauty, published in September.

Other high-profile launches include Sebastian Faulks' Human Traces and Andre Brink's Praying Mantis, while Julian Barnes and John Irving will also be promoting new novels.

Neil Kinnock lectures on August 24, and there are appearances by Clare Short, Tony Benn and Roy Hattersley, as well as by journalists and commentators including Jon Snow, Rageh Omaar, Andrew Marr and William Deedes. There are science events featuring Richard Dawkins and Simon Singh, historians such as Jung Chang (talking about Mao) and David Starkey, and a plethora of Scottish writers including Ian Rankin and Iain Banks.

In all there are around 500 writers on offer during the festival's 17 days, giving visitors to Charlotte Square a dazzling choice of writing for adults and children, fiction and non-fiction. With so much to choose from, reading the programme is like perusing a Chinese take-away menu, with the natural result that you go for the favourites you think you can trust.

That's the potential downside of the Book Festival's blockbuster approach. You are less likely to find the cutting-edge up-and-comers here; more likely to see how book marketing these days puts festivals high on the list of potential sales outlets.

Publishers are keen to make sure their lead authors are given a good showing, festival organisers need to be sure of getting bums on seats, and all of that tends to limit the extent to which any book festival can be genuinely innovative if it's to consist of more than a few people in the back room of a pub.

Edinburgh has lots of competition: Glasgow, Aberdeen, Wigtown and St Andrews all have literary festivals of their own, with much the same author names cropping up on the burgeoning circuit. All of this is a reminder that what writing is really about is people sitting quietly on their own with laptop or notepad; reading is about much the same kind of thing, while that curious sociological beast, the 'author event', lies somewhere between after-dinner speaking and a car-boot sale.

None of that need spoil the fun. Seeing what an author looks like and finding out if he's any good at reading aloud is an amusing pastime in itself. We can be sure that this summer the Edinburgh Book Festival will be crowded, the atmosphere electric, the tills ringing, and everyone will go home happy. The only thing we can't count on is the weather.

Andrew Crumey is Scotland on Sunday's Literary Editor