Edinburgh International Book Festival: Non-fiction Highlights

A broad, deep river of fascinating non-fiction runs through the Book Festival programme from day to day, which seems an appropriate metaphor because one of the highly anticipated visitors is Robert Macfarlane, with his new book, Is A River Alive? (9 August). In addition to this solo event, he will join Louise Welsh, who has campaigned for the Clyde to be granted personhood, and barrister Monica Feria-Tinta, to talk about how seeing landscape differently might help to preserve it (10 August).

Robert Macfarlane PIC: William Waterworth

These events are part of the strand of the programme responding to the theme of repair, which is explored from many angles. William Dalrymple and his fellow podcaster Anita Anand look at looted artefacts, the journeys they have taken and the possibilities of repatriation (13 August). Philippe Sands QC talks about working on the prosecution of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet (10, 11 August).

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Naga Munchetty calls out at misogyny in the health service, and the struggles women face accessing treatment (23 August), Poppy Oktcha and Kathy Slack explore the reparative powers of gardening (10 August) and Hanif Kureishi tells a very personal story of repair following the catastrophic fall which left him paralysed (15 August).

Hanif Kureshi

He is just one of a rich crop of writers bringing their memoirs to the Book Festival. Former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon will unveil her hotly anticipated book (14 August), and fellow politicians Diane Abbott (21 August) and Chris Bryant (20 August) lift the veil on Westminster and their own lives.

Veteran activist, journalist and filmmaker Tariq Ali talks about his memoir, You Can’t Please All (13 August), tracing some of the key moments in recent history which he has witnessed in his 81 years. Yulia Navalnaya visits the festival to speak about her late husband Alexei Navalny, Russia’s opposition leader, whose prison memoir was published after his death in a Russian jail in 2024 (22 August).

Yulia Navalnaya

Leading Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov details the experience of living in a country at war in his memoir, Our Daily War (19 August), and leading Chinese-American novelist Yiyun Li brings a grief memoir like no other, a book in which she processes the suicides of her two teenage sons (10 August).

The festival offers many opportunities to pick up insights on world events. Pulitzer-winning journalist Anne Applebaum joins Edward Wong, diplomatic correspondent of the New York Times, to discuss reporting from the frontline of Donald Trump’s second term (17 August). Leading commentator on race, Ta-Nehisi Coates, talks about his new book, The Message, which explores race relations around the world and questions the messages we tell ourselves (16 August).

Closer to home, former First Minister of Scotland Henry McLeish and James Mitchell, director of the Academy of Government at the University of Edinburgh, reflect on the years since devolution, the achievements and challenges (18 August), and Alistair Moffat presents his new book, To See Ourselves: A Personal History of Scotland since 1950, rich with personal recollections (19 August).

Sometimes the best non-fiction is unclassifiable. Australian writer Richard Flanagan, a major prizewinner for fiction and non-fiction, makes a rare visit overseas to talk about his latest book Question 7, a “masterpiece” in which he brings together disparate events: the atomic bomb, HG Wells’ affair with Rebecca West and his own near-death experiences (19 August). The festival concludes with another special guest, Richard Holloway, whose journey through faith and doubt has been charted in his visits to this festival over the last three decades, with a book he says will be his last, the appropriately titled Last Words (24 August).

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