Latest news with #IanMcEwan
Scotsman
08-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Edinburgh Book Festival 2025: Here are 25 past Booker Prize nominees at this year's event
2 . Ian McEwan One of the greatest living writers – and a man who needs no introduction – Ian McEwan will appear during the 2025 Edinburgh International Book Festival ahead of the publication of his new novel, What We Can Know at McEwan Hall on Sunday, August 24. McEwan became a Booker Prize winner in 1998 for his novel Amsterdam and he is one of the few writers to have been nominated on six occasions. | Getty Images
The National
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The National
Shadi's take on rising oil prices
Favourite piece of music: Verdi's Requiem. It's awe-inspiring. Biggest inspiration: My father, as I grew up in a house where music was constantly played on a wind-up gramophone. I had amazing music teachers in primary and secondary school who inspired me to take my music further. They encouraged me to take up music as a profession and I follow in their footsteps, encouraging others to do the same. Favourite book: Ian McEwan's Atonement – the ending alone knocked me for six. Favourite holiday destination: Italy - music and opera is so much part of the life there. I love it.
Irish Times
22-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
In 28 Years Later, Brexit Britain runs screaming towards its Apocalypse Now. What took it so long?
'Donald Trump is going to make punk rock great again,' the mouthy musician Amanda Palmer said after that individual was elected president of the United States for the first time. You think? In the same year, 2016, the United Kingdom elected to leave the European Union. Nobody suggested that punk would feast on incoming catastrophe, but there was great wailing from the literati. 'I think it's a self-inflicted wound,' Martin Amis said. 'I don't like the nostalgic utopia.' Ian McEwan described Brexit as 'the most pointless, masochistic ambition ever dreamed of in the history of these islands'. One imagined poets and choreographers collapsing in despair up and down the aisles of north London's classier off-licences. READ MORE Brexit would now reap the artistic whirlwind. Right? The Europhobic voters of Stoke-on-Trent will feel silly when they hear about that ballet concerning lengthened queues for non-EU passport holders at Florence airport. Worthwhile anti-Trump culture proved thin on the ground in that president's opening term. There was even less Brexit-bashing art in the aftermath of 'Britain's fateful decision' (to use the approved cliche). We did get a great many popular – and good – nonfiction books on the mechanics of the referendum, its potential aftermath and its moral implications. Fintan O'Toole, of this jurisdiction, had a big hit with Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain . Tim Shipman's All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain's Political Class did what the title claimed in exhaustive fashion. There was a lot more where those came from. But few were writing operas or novels on the topic. We are still awaiting the first great anti-Brexit protest song. These thoughts are prompted by the arrival this week of the second sequel to Danny Boyle 's classic zombie flick 28 Days Later. It hardly needs to be said that Alex Garland's script for 28 Years Later does not halt the violence to ponder article 50 of the Treaty on European Union. [ 28 Years Later review: Danny Boyle's rattling zombie epic never lets up in pace or invention Opens in new window ] We are dealing in allegory here – an unmistakable and blackly hilarious allegory. The mindless zombies have been driven back to Britain from the Continent. (I didn't catch if, like the Romans, the rage virus left Ireland uncolonised.) One proud island off the northeast coast has, however, kept the hordes at bay and, in the process, retreated into a class of mid-20th-century patriotic nostalgia. Boyle intercuts a reading of Rudyard Kipling's poem Boots with clips from Laurence Oliver's Henry V. 'Gentlemen in England now a-bed shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here!' And so on. The film-maker confirmed his intentions to El País newspaper. 'We haven't made a political film,' he said . 'But we've used the current world as a reference, how we behave in it, what cultural legacy we're going to leave behind. Brexit has constrained us, locked us in, and that's what 28 Years Later is about.' A stubborn Mancunian of Irish descent, Boyle will care not a whit if the thumping allegory upsets leavers, not least because it in no way impedes the hurtling progress of the core narrative. He can feel proud of showing how the subject can be addressed without dragging your film into po-faced agitprop. Why have so few artists attempted anything similar over the past decade? Have a look at Anish Kapoor's A Brexit, A Broxit, We All Fall Down from 2019. Created for the Guardian newspaper, it works an enormous cleft along the spine of Britain. The meaning is clear – a little too clear for an artist of Kapoor's subtlety. In 2017 the unavoidable, pseudonymous Banksy delivered a mural showing a sculptor chipping away one star from the EU flag. Not his most affecting piece. British novelists proved reluctant to engage so directly with the subject. It remains an oddity that Ali Smith's Autumn , frequently labelled the first post-Brexit novel, was published just four months after the vote. Alex Preston, writing in the Financial Times, marvelled 'that writing this good could have come so fast'. No deluge of Brexit fiction flowed into the succeeding abyss of negotiation. Plenty of films seemed to offer comment on the Brexit mindset. You could see Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk making the case for either side. The triumphant Paddington 2 played as an argument for diversity and inclusivity. But 28 Years Later really does feel like the closest thing to mainstream cinematic engagement with Brexit since the country voted on June 23rd, 2016. Maybe the argument against feels too much an obsession of elite London dinner parties. Maybe the wider subject is too complex to address as allegory or side narrative. Most likely audiences (and creators) just got sick of it long before the documents were finally signed. It's not Vietnam. Nobody was going to make an Apocalypse Now about Brexit. Though Boyle has come closer than seemed possible.
The Advertiser
22-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Advertiser
Australia's enduring love affair with the US is at a critical point
Few stories start in a more compelling way than Ian McEwan's brilliant novel Enduring Love (1997). Several men, strangers to each other, rush across an English field converging on a stricken helium balloon as they try frantically to hold it grounded long enough to free a child cowering in its basket. As the ungainly apparatus is gusted violently aloft during a wind squall, the men suddenly find themselves "treading air", each facing a terrible choice - whether to hang on in the hope their collective weight will bring it down again or let go before rising too high to survive the fall. It might seem rich to describe Australia's umbilical attachment to the United States as an enduring love, but that unanswerable question in the untethered balloon scene feels disturbingly apt. As does the book's title. The bilateral relationship has survived long enough to natural, even definitional. With that "enduring", though, has come less admirable attributes like unbalanced, fawning, and captive. Hence the reckless conservative boast that Australians have fought alongside Americans in every war they've undertaken since 1900. This includes moral, legal, and strategic outrages like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Like McEwan's disparate characters twisting precariously on guy ropes and slaves to untameable forces of physics, the existential question of whether to cling on or let go, is fast becoming existential. Not that the cheerleaders of the AUKUS caucus are awake to it. While the US talks openly of rehabilitating Russia, invading Greenland and seizing the Panama Canal, they mouth terms like strategic alignment, shared values, cooperation and interoperability. In so many ways, McEwan's exquisitely described dilemma seems like a fitting metaphor for this instant. A temporally reflexive metaphor that works, albeit in different ways, for Australia, for Iran, for Israel, and even for those democracies keeping schtum as another American president contemplates a Middle Eastern war. And as Israel reveals its bottomless reserves of military power and lawless vengeance. In short order, Iran must decide if it is to surrender its nuclear enrichment capacities - even for exclusively peaceful domestic purposes like medical isotopes - or face a US aerial bombardment of unimaginable ferocity. Israel must decide, in the same compressed timeframe, if it is to accommodate such assurances - should Donald Trump insist(?) - or fight on condemning Israelis to further carnage and the state itself to perennial insecurity in its region. It is a choice between an unlikely peace and the guarantee of endless war and an ever-enduring hate. The oafish Trump has no plan. He has bought himself a mere fortnight to decide between backing off or pursuing a path he expressly campaigned against. McEwan's well-meaning strangers who've sprinted towards the flailing balloon exhibit some characteristics of the international community. In the nine days since Israel's far-right Netanyahu government began bombing Iran's nuclear sites without warning, a kind of uncoordinated helplessness has taken hold. Those gathered in Canada for the G7 caved instantly to US and Israeli pressure, citing the Jewish state's limitless "right to defend itself". The group called Iran the "principal source of regional instability". While the criticism of Iran is justified, one might have expected the top liberal states to weigh more heavily the authoritative opinions of international legal scholars such as Professor Ben Saul, Challis chair of international law at the University of Sydney and UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter Terrorism. Saul says Israel's claimed legal impunity simply does not apply here. "Israel claims that its attack is necessary to prevent Iran acquiring nuclear weapons and using them in the future. The problem is that under international law, a country may only defend itself from an actual or imminent armed attack by another country," wrote Saul in the Guardian. As the rules break down, such facts have become ethereal, prone to dissipating, like so much helium. READ MORE KENNY: It is worth remembering that the trend to American unreliability now so blatant, started more than two decades ago, when fragmentary intelligence was deliberately "sexed up" to look like solid intel ahead of the Iraq invasion. America's "forever wars" in Iraq and Afghanistan, with the attendant abuses of Abu Ghraib and the eventual surrender to the very Taliban it had expelled - signalled a loss of prestige internationally. But they also sparked a crisis at the moral and institutional core of America. The nativist, protectionist, anti-establishment Trump is its indignant progeny. A vulgar up-yours to the compromises of democracy and the checks on executive power by laws, courts, multilateral bodies and international norms. As Hugh White notes in his latest insightful Quarterly Essay, "Hard New World: Our Post-American Future", the nation which had saved democracy, then created and policed a post-war rules-based international order, has gone and is not coming back. Now, an avowed America First isolationist scoffs at such an order (globally and domestically) and ridicules the haughty ethics that had underpinned it. Even last week, Trump arrived at the G7 only to complain that Vladimir Putin should be there too. To bend McEwan's balloon dilemma further, Australia might ask itself a further question: are we the poor sods clinging white-knuckled to guy ropes? Or are we perhaps the panicked child cowering in the basket, too frightened to determine our own survival as a sovereign nation? Few stories start in a more compelling way than Ian McEwan's brilliant novel Enduring Love (1997). Several men, strangers to each other, rush across an English field converging on a stricken helium balloon as they try frantically to hold it grounded long enough to free a child cowering in its basket. As the ungainly apparatus is gusted violently aloft during a wind squall, the men suddenly find themselves "treading air", each facing a terrible choice - whether to hang on in the hope their collective weight will bring it down again or let go before rising too high to survive the fall. It might seem rich to describe Australia's umbilical attachment to the United States as an enduring love, but that unanswerable question in the untethered balloon scene feels disturbingly apt. As does the book's title. The bilateral relationship has survived long enough to natural, even definitional. With that "enduring", though, has come less admirable attributes like unbalanced, fawning, and captive. Hence the reckless conservative boast that Australians have fought alongside Americans in every war they've undertaken since 1900. This includes moral, legal, and strategic outrages like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Like McEwan's disparate characters twisting precariously on guy ropes and slaves to untameable forces of physics, the existential question of whether to cling on or let go, is fast becoming existential. Not that the cheerleaders of the AUKUS caucus are awake to it. While the US talks openly of rehabilitating Russia, invading Greenland and seizing the Panama Canal, they mouth terms like strategic alignment, shared values, cooperation and interoperability. In so many ways, McEwan's exquisitely described dilemma seems like a fitting metaphor for this instant. A temporally reflexive metaphor that works, albeit in different ways, for Australia, for Iran, for Israel, and even for those democracies keeping schtum as another American president contemplates a Middle Eastern war. And as Israel reveals its bottomless reserves of military power and lawless vengeance. In short order, Iran must decide if it is to surrender its nuclear enrichment capacities - even for exclusively peaceful domestic purposes like medical isotopes - or face a US aerial bombardment of unimaginable ferocity. Israel must decide, in the same compressed timeframe, if it is to accommodate such assurances - should Donald Trump insist(?) - or fight on condemning Israelis to further carnage and the state itself to perennial insecurity in its region. It is a choice between an unlikely peace and the guarantee of endless war and an ever-enduring hate. The oafish Trump has no plan. He has bought himself a mere fortnight to decide between backing off or pursuing a path he expressly campaigned against. McEwan's well-meaning strangers who've sprinted towards the flailing balloon exhibit some characteristics of the international community. In the nine days since Israel's far-right Netanyahu government began bombing Iran's nuclear sites without warning, a kind of uncoordinated helplessness has taken hold. Those gathered in Canada for the G7 caved instantly to US and Israeli pressure, citing the Jewish state's limitless "right to defend itself". The group called Iran the "principal source of regional instability". While the criticism of Iran is justified, one might have expected the top liberal states to weigh more heavily the authoritative opinions of international legal scholars such as Professor Ben Saul, Challis chair of international law at the University of Sydney and UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter Terrorism. Saul says Israel's claimed legal impunity simply does not apply here. "Israel claims that its attack is necessary to prevent Iran acquiring nuclear weapons and using them in the future. The problem is that under international law, a country may only defend itself from an actual or imminent armed attack by another country," wrote Saul in the Guardian. As the rules break down, such facts have become ethereal, prone to dissipating, like so much helium. READ MORE KENNY: It is worth remembering that the trend to American unreliability now so blatant, started more than two decades ago, when fragmentary intelligence was deliberately "sexed up" to look like solid intel ahead of the Iraq invasion. America's "forever wars" in Iraq and Afghanistan, with the attendant abuses of Abu Ghraib and the eventual surrender to the very Taliban it had expelled - signalled a loss of prestige internationally. But they also sparked a crisis at the moral and institutional core of America. The nativist, protectionist, anti-establishment Trump is its indignant progeny. A vulgar up-yours to the compromises of democracy and the checks on executive power by laws, courts, multilateral bodies and international norms. As Hugh White notes in his latest insightful Quarterly Essay, "Hard New World: Our Post-American Future", the nation which had saved democracy, then created and policed a post-war rules-based international order, has gone and is not coming back. Now, an avowed America First isolationist scoffs at such an order (globally and domestically) and ridicules the haughty ethics that had underpinned it. Even last week, Trump arrived at the G7 only to complain that Vladimir Putin should be there too. To bend McEwan's balloon dilemma further, Australia might ask itself a further question: are we the poor sods clinging white-knuckled to guy ropes? Or are we perhaps the panicked child cowering in the basket, too frightened to determine our own survival as a sovereign nation? Few stories start in a more compelling way than Ian McEwan's brilliant novel Enduring Love (1997). Several men, strangers to each other, rush across an English field converging on a stricken helium balloon as they try frantically to hold it grounded long enough to free a child cowering in its basket. As the ungainly apparatus is gusted violently aloft during a wind squall, the men suddenly find themselves "treading air", each facing a terrible choice - whether to hang on in the hope their collective weight will bring it down again or let go before rising too high to survive the fall. It might seem rich to describe Australia's umbilical attachment to the United States as an enduring love, but that unanswerable question in the untethered balloon scene feels disturbingly apt. As does the book's title. The bilateral relationship has survived long enough to natural, even definitional. With that "enduring", though, has come less admirable attributes like unbalanced, fawning, and captive. Hence the reckless conservative boast that Australians have fought alongside Americans in every war they've undertaken since 1900. This includes moral, legal, and strategic outrages like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Like McEwan's disparate characters twisting precariously on guy ropes and slaves to untameable forces of physics, the existential question of whether to cling on or let go, is fast becoming existential. Not that the cheerleaders of the AUKUS caucus are awake to it. While the US talks openly of rehabilitating Russia, invading Greenland and seizing the Panama Canal, they mouth terms like strategic alignment, shared values, cooperation and interoperability. In so many ways, McEwan's exquisitely described dilemma seems like a fitting metaphor for this instant. A temporally reflexive metaphor that works, albeit in different ways, for Australia, for Iran, for Israel, and even for those democracies keeping schtum as another American president contemplates a Middle Eastern war. And as Israel reveals its bottomless reserves of military power and lawless vengeance. In short order, Iran must decide if it is to surrender its nuclear enrichment capacities - even for exclusively peaceful domestic purposes like medical isotopes - or face a US aerial bombardment of unimaginable ferocity. Israel must decide, in the same compressed timeframe, if it is to accommodate such assurances - should Donald Trump insist(?) - or fight on condemning Israelis to further carnage and the state itself to perennial insecurity in its region. It is a choice between an unlikely peace and the guarantee of endless war and an ever-enduring hate. The oafish Trump has no plan. He has bought himself a mere fortnight to decide between backing off or pursuing a path he expressly campaigned against. McEwan's well-meaning strangers who've sprinted towards the flailing balloon exhibit some characteristics of the international community. In the nine days since Israel's far-right Netanyahu government began bombing Iran's nuclear sites without warning, a kind of uncoordinated helplessness has taken hold. Those gathered in Canada for the G7 caved instantly to US and Israeli pressure, citing the Jewish state's limitless "right to defend itself". The group called Iran the "principal source of regional instability". While the criticism of Iran is justified, one might have expected the top liberal states to weigh more heavily the authoritative opinions of international legal scholars such as Professor Ben Saul, Challis chair of international law at the University of Sydney and UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter Terrorism. Saul says Israel's claimed legal impunity simply does not apply here. "Israel claims that its attack is necessary to prevent Iran acquiring nuclear weapons and using them in the future. The problem is that under international law, a country may only defend itself from an actual or imminent armed attack by another country," wrote Saul in the Guardian. As the rules break down, such facts have become ethereal, prone to dissipating, like so much helium. READ MORE KENNY: It is worth remembering that the trend to American unreliability now so blatant, started more than two decades ago, when fragmentary intelligence was deliberately "sexed up" to look like solid intel ahead of the Iraq invasion. America's "forever wars" in Iraq and Afghanistan, with the attendant abuses of Abu Ghraib and the eventual surrender to the very Taliban it had expelled - signalled a loss of prestige internationally. But they also sparked a crisis at the moral and institutional core of America. The nativist, protectionist, anti-establishment Trump is its indignant progeny. A vulgar up-yours to the compromises of democracy and the checks on executive power by laws, courts, multilateral bodies and international norms. As Hugh White notes in his latest insightful Quarterly Essay, "Hard New World: Our Post-American Future", the nation which had saved democracy, then created and policed a post-war rules-based international order, has gone and is not coming back. Now, an avowed America First isolationist scoffs at such an order (globally and domestically) and ridicules the haughty ethics that had underpinned it. Even last week, Trump arrived at the G7 only to complain that Vladimir Putin should be there too. To bend McEwan's balloon dilemma further, Australia might ask itself a further question: are we the poor sods clinging white-knuckled to guy ropes? Or are we perhaps the panicked child cowering in the basket, too frightened to determine our own survival as a sovereign nation? Few stories start in a more compelling way than Ian McEwan's brilliant novel Enduring Love (1997). Several men, strangers to each other, rush across an English field converging on a stricken helium balloon as they try frantically to hold it grounded long enough to free a child cowering in its basket. As the ungainly apparatus is gusted violently aloft during a wind squall, the men suddenly find themselves "treading air", each facing a terrible choice - whether to hang on in the hope their collective weight will bring it down again or let go before rising too high to survive the fall. It might seem rich to describe Australia's umbilical attachment to the United States as an enduring love, but that unanswerable question in the untethered balloon scene feels disturbingly apt. As does the book's title. The bilateral relationship has survived long enough to natural, even definitional. With that "enduring", though, has come less admirable attributes like unbalanced, fawning, and captive. Hence the reckless conservative boast that Australians have fought alongside Americans in every war they've undertaken since 1900. This includes moral, legal, and strategic outrages like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Like McEwan's disparate characters twisting precariously on guy ropes and slaves to untameable forces of physics, the existential question of whether to cling on or let go, is fast becoming existential. Not that the cheerleaders of the AUKUS caucus are awake to it. While the US talks openly of rehabilitating Russia, invading Greenland and seizing the Panama Canal, they mouth terms like strategic alignment, shared values, cooperation and interoperability. In so many ways, McEwan's exquisitely described dilemma seems like a fitting metaphor for this instant. A temporally reflexive metaphor that works, albeit in different ways, for Australia, for Iran, for Israel, and even for those democracies keeping schtum as another American president contemplates a Middle Eastern war. And as Israel reveals its bottomless reserves of military power and lawless vengeance. In short order, Iran must decide if it is to surrender its nuclear enrichment capacities - even for exclusively peaceful domestic purposes like medical isotopes - or face a US aerial bombardment of unimaginable ferocity. Israel must decide, in the same compressed timeframe, if it is to accommodate such assurances - should Donald Trump insist(?) - or fight on condemning Israelis to further carnage and the state itself to perennial insecurity in its region. It is a choice between an unlikely peace and the guarantee of endless war and an ever-enduring hate. The oafish Trump has no plan. He has bought himself a mere fortnight to decide between backing off or pursuing a path he expressly campaigned against. McEwan's well-meaning strangers who've sprinted towards the flailing balloon exhibit some characteristics of the international community. In the nine days since Israel's far-right Netanyahu government began bombing Iran's nuclear sites without warning, a kind of uncoordinated helplessness has taken hold. Those gathered in Canada for the G7 caved instantly to US and Israeli pressure, citing the Jewish state's limitless "right to defend itself". The group called Iran the "principal source of regional instability". While the criticism of Iran is justified, one might have expected the top liberal states to weigh more heavily the authoritative opinions of international legal scholars such as Professor Ben Saul, Challis chair of international law at the University of Sydney and UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter Terrorism. Saul says Israel's claimed legal impunity simply does not apply here. "Israel claims that its attack is necessary to prevent Iran acquiring nuclear weapons and using them in the future. The problem is that under international law, a country may only defend itself from an actual or imminent armed attack by another country," wrote Saul in the Guardian. As the rules break down, such facts have become ethereal, prone to dissipating, like so much helium. READ MORE KENNY: It is worth remembering that the trend to American unreliability now so blatant, started more than two decades ago, when fragmentary intelligence was deliberately "sexed up" to look like solid intel ahead of the Iraq invasion. America's "forever wars" in Iraq and Afghanistan, with the attendant abuses of Abu Ghraib and the eventual surrender to the very Taliban it had expelled - signalled a loss of prestige internationally. But they also sparked a crisis at the moral and institutional core of America. The nativist, protectionist, anti-establishment Trump is its indignant progeny. A vulgar up-yours to the compromises of democracy and the checks on executive power by laws, courts, multilateral bodies and international norms. As Hugh White notes in his latest insightful Quarterly Essay, "Hard New World: Our Post-American Future", the nation which had saved democracy, then created and policed a post-war rules-based international order, has gone and is not coming back. Now, an avowed America First isolationist scoffs at such an order (globally and domestically) and ridicules the haughty ethics that had underpinned it. Even last week, Trump arrived at the G7 only to complain that Vladimir Putin should be there too. To bend McEwan's balloon dilemma further, Australia might ask itself a further question: are we the poor sods clinging white-knuckled to guy ropes? Or are we perhaps the panicked child cowering in the basket, too frightened to determine our own survival as a sovereign nation?
Scotsman
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Edinburgh International Book Festival 2025: Fiction Highlights
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... It's been 12 long years since Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie last published a novel, but the reviews for Dream Count are so glowing that it seems it's been worth the wait. One of the stars of festival's Front List, she will be appearing (19 August) on stage at the McEwan Hall, when an appropriately large audience will be able to find out why, according to one review, 'nothing less than the whole female experience' is within the scope of her new book. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie PIC:Ian McEwan (no relation) is a welcome repeat visitor to the festival, and has in the past discussed the difficulty of novelists tackling such a diffuse topic as climate change. On the festival's last day (24 August) Kirsty Wark may be able to draw him out on why he has returned to the subject in his next novel, What We Can Know, out in September. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Ian McEwan PIC: Stuartfor BFI Also on the McEwan Hall stage, Maggie O'Farrell (15 August) will be celebrating the 25th anniversary of publishing her debut novel, After You'd Gone. Festival director Jenny Niven will chair the event – and might even get some of the skinny on the filming of Hamnet by Oscar-winning director Chloe Zhao, starring Paul Mescal as Shakespeare and Jessie Buckley as Anne Hathaway. Maggie O'Farrell PIC: Dasha Tenditna Back in the Futures Institute, Abdulrazak Gurnah will be discussing Theft, his first novel since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021 (10 August), while Australia's Michelle de Kretser – winner of her country's Stella award only a fortnight ago for Theory and Practice, her genre-bending 'fictional memoir' – makes her festival debut (16 August). The following day, our own genre-bender Ali Smith will be discussing her dystopian book Gliff, which de Krester herself has hailed as 'an irresistible invitation to rethink and reword our way to a truly brave new world'. What else? If you're looking for the best of Irish fiction, check out Eimear McBride (21 August) and Colum McCann (18 August); for French, see if Laurent Binet (19 August) can interest you in his epistolary detective story featuring half the artists in the Renaissance; work out if Daniel Kehlmann (9 August) deserves his reputation as the leading German novelist of his generation or why Javier Cercas (19 August) – highly regarded by our own Allan Massie – has long enjoyed similar status in Spain. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad I've only room to cram in a few more favourites, but it's impossible to leave out two great double-bills – Alan Hollinghurst appearing alongside Tash Aw (9 August) and Natasha Brown with Hari Kunzru (22 August) or last year's Man Booker winner Samantha Harvey (14 August). The festival's first Thursday is probably the best day to see Scottish writers, as Ewan Morrison, Doug Johnstone, Chris Brookmyre and Denise Mina are all there to talk about their latest novels (Brookmyre's 30th, Mina's 20th) at separate events.
