The Scotsman’s 2025 Edinburgh Festival coverage: everything you need to know

From Saturday 2 August 2025, as the Edinburgh International Festival and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe get under way, we will once again be publishing our daily Festival guides in The Scotsman and Scotland on Sunday, packed with interviews, features, reviews and more, and later in the month we’ll be adding our usual comprehensive coverage of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Edinburgh Art Festival and the Edinburgh International Film Festival.

We’ll also be celebrating the best new writing on the Fringe with our long-running Fringe First Awards, sponsored this year by Queen Margaret University. First established in 1973 by former Scotsman arts editor Allen Wright, the awards have since helped launch countless careers. You can find out more about how the awards work here.

Before all that, we’ll be covering the Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival, which runs from 11-20 July, and we’ll be publishing a whole host of preview coverage to help our readers navigate the world’s biggest arts happening.

Edinburgh’s Royal Mile during August: never a dull moment | Getty Images

If you’d like regular updates from this year’s festivals delivered direct to your inbox, during August our twice weekly Arts & Culture newsletter will be going daily. You can sign up for free at https://www.scotsman.com/newsletter

And if you’re not already a Scotsman subscriber, it's now easier than ever to take out a digital subscription. For just £6.99 per month for our Value package or £12.99 for our Premium package, which includes access to our digital app and ad-free articles, you can get unlimited access to our award-winning journalism and unrivalled festival coverage. For a limited time only, we're offering a three-month trial of our Value package for just £1 per month for three months. Check out our full range of offers and bundles here.

Whether you’re planning to be in Edinburgh this August or not, we hope you enjoy our coverage of the world’s biggest arts festival.

Roger Cox, Arts Editor

REVIEWER BIOGRAPHIES

Kelly Apter is an arts journalist based in Edinburgh. She has been The Scotsman's dance critic since 2000, and also writes for The List magazine, is a regular guest on BBC Radio Scotland's Review show, and is a mentor for emerging dance writers at Aerowaves' Spring Forward festival.

Josephine Balfour-Oatts is a freelance arts journalist and editor. Based in Edinburgh, she regularly contributes as a critic to The Skinny and the Times Literary Supplement, with a particular focus on experimental performance, and theatre-based texts. She graduated from the University of Edinburgh with an MSc in Creative Writing in 2021, and is currently working on a PhD in English Literature, also at the University of Edinburgh.

Ariane Branigan is a freelance theatre reviewer based in Edinburgh, and a previous winner of the Fringe Young Writers Award. This is her fourth Fringe writing for The Scotsman.

Alexander Cohen is a theatre and opera critic. He has been published in The Stage, The Fence, and Broadway World. He was longlisted for the 2024 Observer/Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism. At 24, he was the youngest person to be made a member of the UK Critics’ Circle Drama Section.

Kate Copstick first reviewed for The Scotsman in 1999. Since then she has written on comedy and the arts for everyone from the Observer to the Erotic Review. She has sat on judging panels for So You Think You’re Funny, the (then) Perrier Award and was part of the inaugural panel of judges on the Malcolm Hardee Award.

Ashley Davies is a freelance arts journalist with 25 years of experience on national newspapers. She specialises in comedy interviews and reviews, and has been a judge on a number of competitions, including the Edinburgh Comedy Awards.

Andrew Eaton-Lewis has been Edinburgh festivals editor for The Scotsman and Scotland on Sunday since 2014 when he left a long-running job as group arts editor for both publications to begin a freelance career. He has since worked as a festival director and programmer, theatre producer, musician, writer and PR consultant; his main focus is supporting artists to develop new creative projects.

Rory Ford is a freelance arts and lifestyle journalist who since 1990 has covered Edinburgh’s festivals for The Scotsman, the Edinburgh News and the List as a reviewer, editor and news reporter. He also featured in Jon Ronson’s Critical Condition, a Channel 4 documentary about the 1997 Perrier Awards.

Jim Gilchrist is an Edinburgh-based freelance writer, for many years a staff features and arts writer and columnist with The Scotsman, to which he still contributes regular folk and jazz music reviews. He wrote the Scottish section of Celtic Music (ed. Kenny Mathieson), and co-edited, with Dr Stuart Eydmann, Dolina: An Island Girl’s Journey, the memoir of Gaelic singer, actress and broadcaster Dolina Maclennan.

Alistair Harkness is a freelance film critic, feature writer, Q&A host, lecturer and broadcaster based in Glasgow. He got his start working the red carpet beat for Empire and began writing about film for The Scotsman in 2002, becoming its main critic in 2005. He can frequently be heard talking about film on BBC Radio and has hosted live Q&As with filmmakers, actors and artists for organisations such as BAFTA, Glasgow Film and Sonica.

David Hepburn is a lifestyle journalist writing for The Scotsman and Edinburgh Evening News. He has attended the various Edinburgh festivals for the last 30 years and has previously reviewed for a number of publications including Fringe Report and Fest Magazine.

David Kettle has more than 25 years’ experience in music and arts journalism, including ten years at BBC Music Magazine, two years as editor at London’s South Bank Centre and four years at The Strad magazine. He writes music criticism for The Scotsman and The Daily Telegraph, edits educational resources for Music Teacher magazine, and was programme editor for Scottish Opera and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra.

Duncan Macmillan is Professor Emeritus of the History of Scottish Art at the University of Edinburgh and former curator of Edinburgh's Talbot Rice Gallery. He writes art criticism for The Scotsman, and is author of Painting in Scotland: the Golden Age, Scottish Art 1460-1990 and Scottish Art in the 20th Century.

Carol Main is director of Live Music Now Scotland and Live Music Now International Development (UK) as well as a freelance music journalist. She served almost 20 years as a board director of Edinburgh Festival Fringe and received a Herald Archangel at the 2002 Edinburgh Festival. Carol was awarded an MBE in 2015 for services to music. In April 2021, she was appointed as a member of the board of Creative Scotland.

Susan Mansfield is a freelance arts writer, Scotsman art and theatre critic and a member of The Scotsman's Fringe First Awards team. She is also a published poet, winner of the Jack Clemo Poetry Prize 2018, and author, along with Alastair Moffat, of The Great Tapestry of Scotland: The Making of a Masterpiece.

Mary Miller began her career as a concert violinist, before becoming music editor for Scotland´s national newspaper, a prominent broadcaster and festival programmer. She established and was general and artistic director of Bergen National Opera from 2010-21, and she will lead the national celebrations for St Giles 900 in 2024. She continues to work internationally as a writer, speaker and mentor on cultural policy.

Joyce McMillan is The Scotsman’s chief theatre critic and also writes a political and social commentary column for the paper. She has been a political and arts columnist, theatre critic and broadcaster for more than 30 years, living in Edinburgh and working for various Scottish and London-based newspapers.

Fergus Morgan is an Edinburgh-based freelance arts journalist and critic, specialising in theatre. His work has appeared in The Stage, The Independent, TimeOut, WhatsOnStage, Vice, Exeunt Magazine and elsewhere, and he also publishes The Crush Bar, a popular Substack newsletter dedicated to emerging theatre artists.

Susan Nickalls is music critic, a writer, editor, broadcaster and film producer based in Edinburgh. She recently graduated with an MA in Creative Writing, and is working on her first novel.

Suzanne O'Brien is a freelance journalist, critic and actor based in Edinburgh. She has been reviewing shows at the Edinburgh Fringe since 2018 and joined The Scotsman’s festival team in 2022, after receiving the Fringe Young Writer Award. This is her fourth year writing for the publication during the festival.

David Pollock is an arts writer based in Edinburgh. He has written about theatre for the Stage, The Scotsman, the Independent, the List, the i, the Financial Times and others.

Jay Richardson is a Glasgow-based freelance comedy and arts journalist, with 20 years experience covering the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for the Scotsman. He also writes for British Comedy Guide, Chortle and several national newspapers and magazines and has been published in the US, Canada, Ireland and Australia.

David Robinson is a freelance writer and editor, based in Edinburgh. He was Books Editor of The Scotsman and from 2000-2015, and has been a newspaper journalist all his working life. A collection of his essays and interviews titled In Cold Ink: On the Writers’ Tracks was published in 2011.

Fiona Shepherd is a music and arts journalist, based in Glasgow. She is the chief rock and pop critic of The Scotsman, and also writes for Scotland On Sunday, The List and Edinburgh Festivals magazine. She is co-founder and co-director of Glasgow Music City Tours and Edinburgh Music Tours, which offer guided music-themed walking tours exploring the rich musical history of both cities.

Sally Stott is a freelance writer. She has covered the Edinburgh Festival for the Scotsman for the past 15 years, read and written scripts for the BBC, and won and been shortlisted for various awards as a theatre reviewer, comedy writer and travel journalist. She also helps architects, artists and academics to develop and edit their writing.

Ken Walton has been The Scotsman's classical music critic for more than 20 years. He has also taught music at the University of Glasgow, the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and Hutcheson's Grammar School in Glasgow.