Winter Words: Liz Lochhead, Denise Mina, Louise Welsh and Ricky Ross to appear at theatre’s literary festival

Former Scottish Makar Liz Lochhead, crime writers Denise Mina and Louise Welsh, singer-songwriter Ricky Ross and broadcaster Paul Murton are among the special guests taking part in an annual literary festival staged by one of the country's leading theatres.

Journalist and author Chitra Ramswamy, River City star Lesley Hart, and writer and comic Viv Groskop will also be taking part in Winter Words at Pitlochry Festival Theatre next month. Live audiences will be returning to the event for the first time in three years when the 19th edition of the festival is staged.

Authors, actors, playwrights, poets, broadcasters and musicians will be taking to the stage of the theatre’s main auditorium and its new studio theatre from February 9-12.

Lochhead, one of Scotland’s best-known poets and playwrights, will be in conversation with actress and writer Nicola Roy, host of the Cultural Coven podcast.

Liz lochhead will be among the leading writers appearing in Pitlochry Festival Theatre's Winter Words festival next month.

Playwright David Greig will interviewing Mina on new thriller Confidence, Deacon Blue frontman Ross will discuss his memoir with Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s artistic director Elizabeth Newman, and Colin and Alan McCredie will discuss their respective careers as an actor and photographer.

Ramaswamy will discuss her memoir Homelands, which explores the friendship she – a daughter of Indian immigrants – struck up with a Holocaust survivor who arrived in Britain in 1939.

Welsh will be speaking about her McIlvanney Prize 2022 nominated book The Second Cut, the sequel to her hit novel The Cutting Room.

Hart will be discussing her adaptation of the classic Sherlock Holmes story A Study in Scarlet, which premiered in Pitlochry last year.

Actors Sophia McLean and David Rankine will give a live reading of A Journey with Nan Shepherd, a new play about the celebrated Scottish poet and nature writer. Retired detective David Swindle will be offering an insight into cases involving some of the UK’s most notorious serial killers in special event The Makings of a Murderer.

Ian Bradley, a broadcaster, journalist, lecturer, church minister and author of more than 40 books, will explore the distinctive traditions, beliefs and practices around dying, death and mourning.

Groskop will host a conversation about Chekhov and why his writing is still relevant today, while Murton will discuss his travels across the length and breadth of the Highlands for his recent book.