Named after their commanding officer, Boswell’s Galloping Farmers was the nickname given to the Ayrshire Yeomanry in the First World War, a volunteer cavalry regiment retrained as grenadier infantry. Sent to Gallipoli to fight the Turks in 1915, four yeomen give their own accounts of their involvement in the campaign.

Elsewhere in Southwest Scotland, John Hope and four friends joined the Seaforth Highlanders and set off for the Western Front. The Sanquhar Boys and the Seaforths unveils John’s diaries, chronicling their journey from enlistment in 1915 to the end of the war. Written in secret, these records bear witness to the unimaginable realities faced by these young soldiers. The sole survivor of the five pals, John kept these diaries hidden, sharing the truth of his experiences only towards the end of his life.

John’s granddaughter, Gillian Hope, and Rob Close, editor of Boswell’s Galloping Farmers, tell the story of these remarkable personal records.

In conversation with Peter Kennerley

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Age: 12+ Limited numbers

A Room of One’s Own

Performed in the round by Ellie Zeegen and directed by Richard Baron

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction Virginia Woolf

Employing a host of historical characters from Jane Austen to Shakespeare’s sister, the play showcases why the real Virginia Woolf’s brilliant, funny and richly entertaining essay about freedom and identity (written almost a hundred years ago as a lecture delivered to female undergraduates at Girton College, Cambridge) has become one of the most powerful and significant feminist manifestos of this time, indeed any time.

Firebrand Theatre Company’s new adaptation unfurls as a historical and literary quest that is rich in delicious irony and spiced with a range of colourful character sketches.

This performance by actress Ellie Zeegen has toured to great acclaim and sell-out audiences, including Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s Winter Words Festival in February 2025.

Audiences describe it as “Powerful, moving, brilliant and memorable”

Introduced by Victoria Henderson

Film Premiere: James ‘Corsica’ Boswell

Corsican filmmaker Lionel Dumas-Perini introduces his fascinating new documentary on the intertwined lives and times of James Boswell and Corsica’s rebel leader, General Pascale Paoli. Filmed against backdrops in Corsica, London and Ayrshire, Dumas-Perini brings to life, through actors as well as interviews with international Boswell scholars and enthusiasts, the remarkable tale of the young James Boswell’s friendship with Paoli.

James Boswell’s Grand Tour of Europe in 1765 takes him to Corsica where he meets Paoli who becomes the hero in his 1768 book, An Account of Corsica, which chronicless Corsica’s struggle for independence from the Genoese. An instant best-seller, the book brought Paoli lasting fame, not least with fellow Corsican Napoleon Bonaparte. Corsica’s democratic constitution, drafted by Paoli, went on to inspire Benjamin Franklin and George Washington who used it for the blueprint for the American Constitution.

Paoli exiled himself in London in 1769 and was to remain a lifelong friend of Boswell.

Introduced by Gordon Turnbull

‘Deliciously gifted... Nothing and no one escapes his attention’ Observer

A brilliantly written, evocative, witty and funny collection of stories that draw on the wealth of film and TV ideas created over the course of a fascinating career. As an actor Rupert Everett was most recently on our screens in Napoleon. As writer and director, his film of Oscar Wilde’s later years, The Happy Prince, was released to widespread acclaim.

Here in The American No, he brings us seven stories of love and loss, drama and glamour, hope and rejection, all written with the insight of an experienced actor, adding up to an intriguing self-portrait of himself at work.

A cast of extraordinary characters immerse the reader in exhilarating worlds, from a touching portrayal of Proust’s creative life and childhood and the ferociously unforgiving world of a Los Angeles talent agency to a middle-aged Russian countess confronting sex and age in a Cotswold teashop and a blackly humorous story of a chaotic and emotional funeral in Paris. His earlier volumes of memoir, Red Carpets and other Banana Skins and Vanished Years became instant best-sellers.

In conversation with Fiona Armstrong

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History’s first named bagpiper performed ‘with a bag tucked under his armpit’. He was the Roman Emperor Nero. Since then, this strange animal-like conflation of bag and sticks has become the world’s most beloved and contested instrument. Another piping emperor, Tsar Peter the Great, decided that his departed pet bear would live on - as a bagpipe.

Biographer and former Pipe Major Richard McLauchlan’s vivid history tells the long story of an instrument boasting over 130 varieties, yet commonly associated with just one, from one country: Scotland’s Great Highland Bagpipe. Telling anecdotes abound, such as the piper who played troops into battle at Waterloo and his great-grandson doing the same 100 years later at the Battle of the Somme. He brings the story up-to-date with the rise of women pipers and the way in which a ‘national instrument’ can shift in meaning amidst the currents of identity.

No event like this would be complete without hearing the pipes, and there will be a short live performance.

“’The Lament for the Children’ was the greatest single line of music ever written.” Yehudi Menuhin

In conversation with Michael Malone

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On October 8 in 2013, the Buddhist monk, Gelong Thubten woke to the shocking news that his spiritual teacher, mentor and closest friend, the leader of the Samye Ling monastery in Dumfriesshire, Akong Tulku Rinpoche, had been brutally murdered in Chengdu, China.

Thubten’s book Handbook for Hard Times describes his having to deal with the aftermath of the tragedy when ‘it felt as if my entire universe had come crashing down.’ To survive this trauma, he turned to Rinpoche’s own teachings - to embrace suffering rather than shy away from it. ‘We humans’ he writes ‘can send rockets to the moon but find it hard to deal with what goes on inside our heads and hearts.’

Thubten, one of Tibetan Buddhism’s leading monks, will show how a more sustainable happiness can emerge through the transformation of suffering, freeing us to achieve ‘Fearless Living’.

This transformational book follows on from the best-selling A Monk’s Guide to Happiness.

In conversation with Vivian French

A full meditation session will take place at 12:30 (limited numbers)

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Award winning, best-selling writer, Sara Sheridan, whose most recent novels The Fair Botanists set in Edinburgh in 1824 and The Secrets of Blythswood Square set in Glasgow in 1846, excels at weaving real life historical figures into compelling narratives.

She will talk about the art and discipline of combining the genres of fiction and historical biography; about her fascination with the past and how it triggers plot lines; and of treasures to be found in archives, as revealed in the current reissue of an earlier novel On Starlit Seas, inspired by the Victorian travel writer, Maria Graham, based on Sheridan’s research in the archive of Graham’s own publisher, John Murray, in the National Library of Scotland. Sheridan will also reveal in a twist worthy of fiction what drew her to re-issuing On Starlit Seas.

In conversation with Rodge Glass

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Leading historians throw new light on two queens who shaped Scotland’s destiny

The Thistle and the Rose focuses on the misunderstood and underestimated monarch Margaret Tudor - child-wife to the king of Scotland, James IV and sister to the king of England, Henry VIII - here convincingly reconfigured as a skilled and ambitious power player in her own right. Widowed in 1513 she goes on to successfully manage disastrous marriages and sibling rivalry constructing a powerful position in her adopted Scotland as she fights for the rights of the child king, her son, James V.

In contrast, Mary Queen of Scots, successor to her father James V, spent almost two decades as a prisoner before her death at Fotheringhay Castle in 1587. From her chambers of captivity, she wrote countless letters, many encrypted using complex ciphers to prevent her communications from being intercepted. More than 400 years after Mary’s death, the recent discovery of further encoded letters has allowed historian Jade Scott to paint a vivid portrait of one of history’s most compelling figures in Captive Queen.

In conversation with Anna Groundwater

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The orange we know, waxed in vats, gathered in red netting and stacked in supermarkets, is not the same orange that grew from the first straggling orange grove that took root on the Tibetan plateau, part pomelo and part mandarin. The orange is a souvenir of history. Across time, it has been a harbinger of God and doom, fortune and failure, pleasure and suffering. It is a fruit that inspires metaphors, dreams, mythologies, superstitions, parables and histories within its tough rind. What happens when the fruit is peeled and each segment - each moment of history, each meaning in time - is pulled apart?

In this distinct, subversive and intimate hybrid memoir, Foreign Fruit, writer and editor Katie Goh explores the orange as a means of understanding the world, and herself within it. What she finds is a world of violence, colonialism, resilience, survival, adaptation - and of unexpected beauty and sweetness against all odds.

In conversation with Esa Aldegheri

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Multi-award-winning comedian, travel writer and columnist, Dom Joly sets out on a global journey, immersing himself in the strange world of conspiracies.

Conspiracy theories used to be fun, a bit of laugh. Did we really land on the moon? Was Paul McCartney cloned? Nowadays, however, in the aftermath of a global pandemic, and with the ever-increasing influence of social media algorithms, they are part of the body politic and a massive cause of division and mistrust.

Joly’s travels see him meeting followers of QAnon in Cornwall and some New Age-ers in Glastonbury; hunting for UFOs in New Mexico; chasing Alex Jones of Info Wars around Austin, Texas; trying to prove that Finland exists and taking a flat-earther to the edge of the world. He finds the funny and the quirky, but also attempts to understand what makes people so drawn to conspiracy theories.

In conversation with Allan Little

‘The Flat Earth Society has members all around the globe’ Flat Earth Society Facebook Post

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Meditation Session

Join Gelong Thubten in a meditation session to increase your power of mindfulness.

Gelong (meaning Senior Monk) Thubten, was educated at Oxford University before becoming an actor in London and New York. Experiencing severe burn out, he entered Samye Ling monastery in Dumfriesshire and has spent six years in meditation retreats, the longest being four years. He is a world pioneer in the mindfulness movement and teaches internationally, including training Benedict Cumberbatch and Tilda Swinton in meditation techniques for their roles in a Marvel movie.

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“Helen Lederer is the third funniest woman in the world” Dawn French

Known to thousands as Catriona in the iconic Absolutely Fabulous, Helen Lederer has been part of comedy shows from Bottom, Happy Families, Naked Video, French and Saunders to Girls on Top.

Not That I'm Bitter is her powerful, frank, moving, and characteristically funny memoir of the child of a Jewish-Czech wartime refugee who became one of a handful of women at the heart of the right-on alternative comedy scene in the 1980s. Piece of cake? Bit of a laugh? Well, yes, and no.

Using humour to battle her problems with weight and low-self-esteem and showing how laughter can defeat the darker moments, it's Lederer's vulnerability that make her such a human narrator of her successes, but also of her mistakes.

Where are the jokes in addictions to diet-pills and steroid injections? Helen raises an important and open discussion around mental health alongside the evolved attitudes to women today. There's something in Helen Lederer's life-story that everyone can relate to.

A genuinely funny memoir with lots of heart - and just the right amount of bitterness! She pulls no punches, but every blow is wrapped in a laugh of recognition. Revealing, and moving, this is sweet, sour, laugh out loud, and addictive.

In conversation with Anna Burnside

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Ingrained is a love letter to trees, timber and craftsmanship - and to finding your own voice. The eldest son of a master woodworker, Callum Robinson spent his childhood surrounded by wood and trees, absorbing craft lessons in his father's workshop and becoming his apprentice, helping to create exquisite bespoke objects.

But eventually the need to find his own path led him to establish his own design business going from commercial success to near-bankruptcy. Faced with its collapse, and the consequent dispersal of his team and everything he had worked so hard to build, he was forced to question what mattered most.

Callum tells the story of returning to his own workshop in a loch-side forest in the Scottish hills and to the world of wood; to handcrafting furniture for people who will love it and pass it on to the next generation - antidotes to a culture where everything seems so easily disposable.

In conversation with Susanna Beaumont

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In April 2021, the Court of Appeal quashed the convictions of 39 former Sub-Postmasters and ruled their prosecutions were an affront to the public conscience. They were just a few of the hundreds who had been prosecuted by the Post Office using IT evidence from an unreliable computer system called Horizon. When the Post Office became aware that Horizon didn't work properly, it covered it up.

In The Great Post Office Scandal, journalist and broadcaster Nick Wallis, reporter on the scandal for over ten years who acted as consultant on the ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office, recounts hitherto untold stories. Giving voice to the many innocent people who had their lives ruined by a once-loved national institution that has become a byword for corporate callousness and incompetence Wallis narrates how, against overwhelming odds, they fought back to clear their names.

Joining Nick Wallis will be Robert (Rab) Thomson who was Sub-Postmaster at Alloa, wrongly convicted of theft in 2006, and whose case in 2024 became the first in Scotland to be quashed by the Court of Session. He will talk about the tragic impact and emotional toll the Post Office prosecution has had, and continues to have, on him and his family.

In conversation with Sheena McDonald

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Workshop: Creative Writing and Family History

Discover how to bring your family history to life and write about it.

Join writer Sarah Smith for a relaxed and practical workshop. As a family history researcher, Sarah has used family histories both to create fiction and to write and enhance non-fiction. In both she shines a light on our connections with the past.

Whether you’ve built an entire family tree, or are just getting started on genealogical research, you’ll know how intriguing - and elusive - our forebears can be. But when it comes to telling stories, the gaps in our knowledge can be just as important as what we manage to pin down.

Acclaimed for her page-turner Hear No Evil, Sarah will share tips and prompts to help with your own writing, whatever stage you’re at.

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Juano Diaz’s memoir Slum Boy recalls a world in which his Glaswegian mother, an addict, frequently abandoned him in his cold, damp, windowless bedroom until he was taken into care at the age of four and placed in a children’s home.

In stark contrast, he is now a celebrated visual artist and photographer whose work has featured Madonna, Grace Jones and Pharrell Williams.

The adoption of this young mixed-race boy, renamed John MacDonald in the 1980s by a loving but strict Catholic Romany family, gave him a stable childhood until the conflict arising from his true identity as gay led him to be thrown out of the family home.

Penniless, he sheltered with rent boys in Glasgow but spent his days in Kelvingrove Art Gallery, a haven and inspiration for the budding young artist. Searching for his birth mother, he discovered her life of prostitution, alcohol, and mental illness. It was here at her side that he finally learned his real name, Juano Diaz.

In conversation with Rodge Glass

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‘This is the page-turner that Buckingham’s short, racy life deserves’ DAILY TELEGRAPH

An immersive biography of the Duke of Buckingham, King James I & VI’s favourite confidant, gatekeeper, right-hand man and lover, summoning an era that still resonates today as it navigates love, war-fever and pacifism in a society on the brink of cataclysmic change. When Charles I succeeded his father, he was similarly enthralled and made Buckingham his confidant.

In Scapegoat, written with a novelist’s touch, Lucy Hughes-Hallett conjures a courtly world of masques and dancing, exquisite clothes, the art of Rubens and Van Dyck, gender-fluidity, same-sex desire and appallingly rudimentary medicine.

Aware of the power of his own beauty, Buckingham’s influence brought him immense wealth and power, becoming one of the most flamboyant and enigmatic Englishmen at the heart of seventeenth-century royal and political life. His fall from grace was equally spectacular as he came to represent everything that was wrong with the country.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett is a prize-winning cultural historian, biographer and novelist.

In conversation with Anna Groundwater

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The Bookseller magazine recently stated that Pam Ayres is one of the UK’s best-selling poets since records began. She has been delighting the nation - and making us laugh - for almost 50 years. Pam will talk about her new book, Doggedly Onward - A Life In Poems, and will include a selection of poems and stories from this book, which covers the period from the 1970s to 2020s.

Recent TV appearances include two series of The Cotswolds for Channel 5, This Morning, Alan Titchmarsh, Countdown and Would I Lie To You?

“Who doesn’t feel warm, sentimental, and downright good when they think of Pam Ayres? She’s a timeless talent and a glorious people’s poet.” Glastonbury Festival 2022

“If people are fond of me, I am delighted, and I hope I have given a lot of people a laugh, as that is a great experience - to laugh!”

Chaired by Anna Burnside

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John Suchet was one of the UK's best-known television journalists and newscasters, regularly presenting ITN's flagship News at Ten. In a second career he turned to classical music, writing the bestselling Beethoven: The Man Revealed.

In his latest book In Search of Beethoven, part biography, part memoir, part travelogue, Suchet draws on his own life and career as a foreign correspondent and news anchor to reveal how Beethoven’s music has accompanied him through the best and worst of times. It was with him as a music-loving and adventurous teenager, as a journalist entering Beirut in the grip of civil war and is still with him as he continues to explore the old cities of Bonn and Vienna in search of the man behind the music. His journey, both literal and symbolic, using his own experience as a Beethoven aficionado demonstrates the life-changing power of great music.

‘From palaces to warzones, John Suchet goes on a Beethoven odyssey’ The Daily Telegraph

In association with The Cumnock Tryst

In conversation with Sheena McDonald

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Hungering for Fame

Two centuries before the term ’The Attention Economy’ was coined for our time, the great Ayrshire diarist and biographer, James Boswell, ninth Laird of Auchinleck, inhabited it. Best known to us for his biographical works on Samuel Johnson and his candid diaries and letters, Boswell was also a determined self-publicist, keeping himself visible in the public eye via the social media of his day.

Making his annual Festival appearance, Gordon Turnbull, former General Editor of the Yale Boswell Editions, reveals a Boswell burning with what Samuel Johnson called 'the Fever of Renown’ - source of both Boswell’s great literary achievements and his self-tormented restlessness - and asking whether all the self-tortured hungering for fame was worth it in the end.

Chaired by Peter Kennerley

Books will be available to purchase over the Festival weekend

In 2024 the news that the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was dead sent shockwaves around the world.

Murder in the Gulag is a warts-and-all biography of one of the most fearless and inspiring figures of our time. Award-winning journalist John Sweeney, who knew Alexei Navalny personally, also reveals what really happened to the Russian opposition leader in the freezing Polar Wolf penal colony in a remote part of Siberia.

Patriot is Navalny’s own mind-blowing memoir, his final letter to the world ending with his prison diaries written from the cell where he died in 2024, aged 47.

Sweeney asks: ‘If the West fails to stand up more forcefully to Putin, are we in danger not just of betraying Ukraine but our own security too?’ and, ‘Did Russia's democratic opposition and its dream of change, of the “wonderful Russia of the future”, die in an Arctic prison yard along with Alexei Navalny?’

The larger-than-life journalist, based in London and Kyiv, is the author of 15 books and in his many years at the BBC he challenged dictators, despots, cult leaders and crooked businessmen.

In conversation with Allan Little

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Joshua died the same day he was born. In Joshua in the Sky, Rodge Glass memorializes his nephew, who died in 2017 from HHT (hereditary haemorrhagic telangiectasia), a genetic mutation that Rodge also carries, which causes blood vessels to form abnormally and in Joshua’s case meant he was unable to breathe.

In coming to terms with his grief and trying to make sense of his nephew’s death, Rodge considers the value of hidden lives, devoting the same attentiveness to describing the sadly small life of Joshua that he gave to Alasdair Gray when writing the biography for which he won the Somerset Maugham Award.

Rodge Glass, author of eight books, will explore why hidden lives should be cherished as part of the way decisions are taken by biographers to determine who gets to be remembered and how - from the great and the good, to the unseen.

In conversation with Meg Flaherty

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Adam Nicolson, who grew up in the glorious surroundings of the National Trust Sissinghurst Castle, is an award-winning nature writer with a deep knowledge of the Scottish landscape, best known for Sea Room, his gripping memoir of his time spent on the Shiant Isles; and The Seabird's Cry recounting the current disaster afflicting the world's seabirds.

His new book Bird School was crafted from his time cocooned within a small shed amongst the trees in a forgotten field overrun by bracken and thicketed by brambles, season after season, looking, listening and getting to know the birds to see what it might teach him.

Beautifully written and woven through with philosophy, literature, science and a sense of wonder, always conscious that this is an age in which the natural world is under siege, Bird School pulls back the curtain on seemingly ordinary birds, taking a long, careful and concerned look at our relationship with the wild.

In conversation with Patrick Laurie

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In a terrific coup for festival-goers one of the outstanding scholars and curators of the Golden Age of Dutch painting, Tico Seifert, will be joining the Pullitzer prize-winning biographer and art explorer, Ben Moser, to talk about how the great 17th century Dutch masters, have shaped their lives and work.

Moser’s The Upside-Down World examines ‘17 artists and one mistress’ in a series of radical biographical portraits including of the three inter-connected geniuses Rembrandt, Vermeer and the artist of The Goldfinch, Carel Fabritius.

It was Seifert who persuaded The Mauritshuis in the Hague to lend The Goldfinch to the Scottish National Gallery in 2016. He will reveal what it took to lure one of the world’s rarest masterpieces to Scotland and the mainspring of his quest. Meanwhile, Moser, aged 25, had moved to the Netherlands to follow a love affair and ended up in love with a 400 year old painter, Rembrandt, who was also the focus of another ground-breaking exhibition in Edinburgh staged by Seifert - ‘Rembrandt: Britain’s Discovery of the Master’.

In Conversation with James Knox, curator emeritus, the Fleming Collection.

Event sponsored by RNIB Connect Radio

This new event replaces that of Laura Cumming, who is sadly now unable to attend the book festival. 

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Legendary ballet dancer Wayne Sleep looks back on the extraordinary times he's lived through

Wayne Sleep has danced with ballet legends Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn, partied with Freddie Mercury and performed on the Covent Garden stage in 1985 with Princess Diana, becoming her close friend.

Ninette de Valois, founder of the Royal Ballet, described him as “the greatest virtuoso dancer the Royal Ballet has ever produced”. Wayne was also the shortest principal dancer in the Royal Ballet and as such he had to spin twice as fast and jump twice as high to succeed.

However, behind the glitz and glamour, Wayne has always felt like an outsider revealing in Just Different the difficulties experienced by a working-class, gay man in handling the prejudices of his generation and living through the Aids epidemic.

In this moving - but also laugh-out-loud and gossip filled - memoir, Wayne Sleep shows how he danced his way to success, fulfilment and love, overcoming obstacles along the way.

In conversation with Robert Dawson Scott

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Journalism in Peril

At a time when truth, accuracy and plain facts are under constant threat from the falsehoods pedalled by pundits, politicians and influencers on social media platforms, what is the state of journalism today?

Under threat is objective ‘routine’ reporting in local and national titles - whether on-line or in print; investigative teams uncovering national and international injustices; the integrity of war reporting and the lack of bandwidth for long-term coverage of ‘forgotten’ wars and humanitarian disasters.

Don’t miss the insights and unvarnished truth from Charlie English, former head of international news at The Guardian and John Sweeney, old school journalist and author of a biography of Alexei Navalny.

Chaired by Mure Dickie

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At a time when translated books such as Butter by Asako Yuzuki and Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck are hitting the bestseller lists, the art of translation has never been more relevant and British readers are increasingly hungry for writing from other cultures. We have brought together a panel of experts to explore the challenges and economics of translation to tell us why it is so important.

Allan Cameron is founder of Glasgow-based Vagabond Voices which mainly publishes translated novels, and the translator of twenty-seven fiction and non-fiction books by authors such as famous historian and novelist Alessandro Barbero, Romano Prodi and Eric Hobsbawm. He recently translated Fear in the World by Corrado Alvaro.

Joseph Farrell is former Professor of Italian at Strathclyde University, author and translator, including of the infamous play by Nobel prize-winning Dario Fo, Mistero Buffo, which can be seen both at Oran Mor in Glasgow and in The Gaiety in Ayr this month. His most recent translation is The Darkest Winter by the Italian writer Carol Lucarelli.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett, biographer and former chair of the International Booker Prize, will guide the conversation discussing the importance of a good translation in the success of a story outside its own language.

Workshop - From the flowering of the idea to print

Some people say everyone has a book in them. Maybe you’ve started, but don’t know any of the “rules”; or you’ve worked your way into a corner; or you’ve finished, gone the rounds of agents and publishers to receive nothing but a heart-sinking “no”; and you’re not sure where to go next.

Michael J Malone - award-winning poet, writer of 14 published novels, book-seller, literary judge and teacher of creative writing - can help you! His latest book The Torments is a supernatural mystery set in Ayrshire.

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Describing himself as an evangelist for British art, BBC’s presenter of ‘Britain’s Lost Masterpieces’ embarks on a journey of discovery through an incredible array of artworks, architecture and artists from 10,000 BCE to the flowering of landscape painting led by Turner and Constable, which he believes is Britain’s major artistic achievement.

Along the way he reveals how the art from these isles was created, what made it distinctive, and why it took so long to emerge. It is a story of beginnings, focussing on those truly original artists who were the first in their field; and as you would expect from the connoisseur TV presenter, he is unashamedly forthright in describing an artwork as beautiful or sublime and in some cases as unexpectedly bad.

‘Inventive, profound, fabulously quirky, Bendor Grosvenor’s journey takes him in directions that have never previously been trodden … A triumph.’ Waldemar Januszczak

In conversation with James Knox

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Technology is not just something we use - it shapes who we are. In Wise Animals: How Technology Has Made Us What We Are, philosopher and tech expert Dr Tom Chatfield explores how our relationship with tools, from ancient artefacts to artificial intelligence, has defined human evolution. With insight and urgency, he examines how AI is changing creativity, identity, and power in the digital age.

Chatfield will also explore the growing challenges AI poses to writers and the publishing industry as – often without their knowledge – their work is being used to train AI systems without permission or compensation.

As algorithms generate text and reshape creative work, what does this mean for authorship and originality? Writing, reading and storytelling are how we forge meaningful bonds between people; is AI a threat or a benefit to writers and their readers?

One of the most original tech thinkers writing today, Chatfiield’s acclaimed books have explored digital culture, AI, tech ethics and the future of authorship.

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A biographical study of Hitler's inner circle offers a new way to understand the horrors of the Nazi regime

Why did so many Germans take part in the crimes of Nazi Germany? How did they come to support Hitler and follow him almost to the very end? For too long, the Nazis have been presented in simplified terms as little more than psychopaths or criminals. In his major new work, renowned historian Richard J. Evans makes use of a mass of recently unearthed new evidence to present a more realistic view of Nazi perpetrators as human beings who were disturbingly like us.

In Hitler’s People, Evans offers rounded, fresh and often startling new portraits of the men and women who created and served Nazi Germany, beginning with Hitler himself; going on to encompass leading figures like Göring, Goebbels and Himmler; enforcers of Hitler’s orders, such as Eichmann and Heydrich; propagandists like Leni Riefenstahl; low-level perpetrators, such as the notorious Irma Grese and unknown sympathizers and fellow-travellers who helped the regime in myriad ways.

In conversation with Allan Little

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The Enduring Impact of the Korean War on Asia’s Geopolitics Today

Examining Asia’s geopolitics are Mure Dickie, the Financial Times’ Asia correspondent and Robert Lyman, author of Korea: War Without End. They paint a picture of the nations and their leaders, past and present, including North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un and the impeachment of the South Korean President, Yoon Suk Yeol.

At a time of acute international peril, the causes, outcomes and legacy of the Korean War, triggered by the West’s refusal to appease an aggressor, have rarely been more pertinent.

Doubts about the stability of South Korea’s democracy, and about the commitment of the US to the alliances that secure the country and neighbouring Japan, have implications far beyond the region. Any crisis between them and the axis of autocracy of Russia, China and North Korea, would send shockwaves throughout the world.

In conversation with Dr Youngmi Kim

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What if the food you need is all around you, waiting to be discovered? Mo Wilde, forager and medical herbalist who lives in a self-built wooden house with an organic teaching garden in West Lothian, will talk about her love of plants and medicinal species and the abundance of natural treasures to be found in Scotland's natural larder.

In an era of rising food insecurity and climate crisis, foraging helps us reconnect with lost knowledge. In her talk on Free Food: Wild Plants and How to Eat Them, Mo will take you on a journey into the world of wild food, exploring the benefits of foraging and offering a deeper connection to the land and the food we eat.

Whether you live in a city or the countryside, an abundance of free food is at your doorstep. Not only is it sustainable, but it’s also packed with nutrients and flavour beyond anything in supermarkets.

In conversation with Theresa Talbot

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Imagine you could hold a baby hare and bottle-feed it. Imagine that it lived under your roof and drummed on the duvet cover when it wanted your attention – and that two years later, it still returned to your house for hours on end. This happened to me.

When lockdown led busy professional Chloe to leave the city and return to the countryside of her childhood, she never expected to find herself custodian of a newly born hare. Yet when she finds the creature, endangered, alone and no bigger than her palm, she is compelled to give it a chance at survival whilst determined to let it return to the natural world. Making no attempt to domesticate it she learned to adapt her own life, creating an environment where human and wild animal could exist side by side.

Her best-selling Raising Hare, a story that has captured the imagination of thousands, is a life-affirming observation of a mystical creature.

In conversation with Sally Magnusson

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A Book is Like a Reservoir of Freedom

The CIA Book Club tells the true story, for the first time, of George Minden, the head of a covert intelligence operation known as the ‘CIA books programme’, which aimed to win the Cold War with literature as it infiltrated over 10 million banned titles into the Eastern Bloc. The chosen books were by a vast and eclectic list of authors, including Hannah Arendt, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, George Orwell and Agatha Christie. Once inside the Soviet bloc, each book would circulate secretly among dozens of like-minded readers, quietly turning them into dissidents. With no physical combat, the conflict would be a battle for hearts, minds and intellects.

Former Guardian journalist Charlie English highlights the work of a handful of extraordinary people, such as an underground Polish publisher who endured beatings, force-feeding and exile in service of this mission in which books were smuggled on trucks, aboard yachts, dropped from balloons, and hidden in the luggage of hundreds of thousands of individual travellers.

In conversation with Rodge Glass

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Rebecca Achieng Ajulu-Bushell was once a double British Champion and the first Black woman ever to swim for Great Britain. Ex-elite athlete Ajulu-Bushell explains why, in the run up to the 2012 London Olympics, she walked away from it all at the age of 17 after reaching such heights in her career and despite her singular love of the water. She reveals the true cost of excellence in sport.

Her memoir These Heavy Black Bones lays bare the pressures within the swimming world as she reflects on what she gave up; missing the ecstasy of peak physical performance achieved as her body and mind were sharpened through gruelling training, but with no regrets about escaping the press scrutiny, bullying and separation from normality endured during the harshness of adolescence.

Since then, she has graduated from Oxford and recently became CEO of the 10,000 Interns Foundation that champions under-represented talent in Britain.

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From Ayrshire’s very own Andrew O’Hagan, the author of Mayflies, comes the new paperback publication of an irresistible, unputdownable, state-of-the-nation novel - the story of one man’s epic fall from grace.

Caledonian Road has been lauded by critics and readers alike as worthy of Dickens, Thackeray or Zola for its vast narrative sweep and sparkling satire and style. O’Hagan’s brilliant storytelling encompasses decadent aristocrats, Russian oligarchs, human traffickers and at its heart is the rise and fall of the on-trend, liberal academic, Campbell Flynn, pursued by his ruthless protégé.

In Mayflies and Caledonian Road, as well as in essays for the London Review of Books and the New Yorker, O’Hagan has forged a Scottish style of comedy and moral enquiry that has garnered him an international audience.

For this special keynote event at the Boswell Book Festival, O'Hagan will entertain us with a sparkling address ‘On Humour’. “Comedy is the beating heart of everything I write,” he says, “and the heart of the Scotland I grew up in.” Using his own work and the great traditions of homegrown satire, from Burns to Billy Connolly, the comedians of Scottish home life, O’Hagan sets out on a personal journey to prove that performance is the cornerstone of his own writing and our national literature.

Chaired by James Knox

Event sponsored by RNIB Connect Radio

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Yoga and Journaling Workshop:

Enjoy a 75-minute Yoga and Journaling Workshop combining gentle movement with mindful writing. Through guided breathing, gentle poses, and reflective journaling prompts, you'll explore the mind-body connection while releasing tension and accessing deeper self-awareness.

This supportive space encourages grounding, self-discovery, and balance.

No prior experience needed, just bring a yoga mat, notebook and pen.

I’m one of his biggest fans! Bono, U2

When legendary music journalist Billy Sloan was 15 he saw The Who play an incendiary live show at Green's Playhouse in Glasgow. It was the beginning of a lifelong love affair with music. Just a few years later he was backstage interviewing the likes of Keith Richards and David Bowie, at the height of Ziggy-mania.

In One Love, One Life, Billy tells his stories of the stars, from skipping Christmas dinner to see the notorious Sex Pistols to adventures with some of music's biggest names. There's Grace Jones in the bath, candid conversations with Rod Stewart, football in Brazil with Simple Minds, a tour of the White House with Paolo Nutini and close encounters with U2. Plus, the interviews that definitely didn't go as planned.

Brilliantly entertaining and searingly honest, One Love, One Life is an incredible insight into the stars we love and an unmissable backstage pass for music fans everywhere.

In conversation with Heather Suttie

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Creators of the Witches of Scotland campaign call for a public apology for witches

As a woman, if you lived in Scotland in the 1500s, there was a very good chance that you, or someone you knew, would be tried as a witch. Witch hunts ripped through the country for over 150 years, with at least 4,000 accused, and with many women's fates sealed by a grizzly execution of strangulation, followed by burning in this legally sanctioned victimisation.

With testimony from a small army of experts, pen portraits of the women accused, trial transcripts, witness accounts and legal documents, How to Kill A Witch forms a rich and moving patchwork of tragic stories, revealing exactly why the Patriarchy went to such extraordinary lengths to silence women.

Helping us comprehend the underlying reasons for this terrible injustice, Claire Mitchell, KC, and writer Zoe Venditozzi have delved deeply into just why the trials exploded in Scotland to such a degree and raise the serious question - could it ever happen again?

In conversation with Sheena McDonald

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For hundreds of millennia, fire has been a partner in our evolution, shaping culture and civilization. Yet in our age of intensifying climate change, we are seeing its destructive power unleashed in ways never before witnessed by human beings, with wildfires raging in many parts of the world.

Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize, John Vaillant, and Scottish author and journalist Cal Flyn, together explore our rapidly changing relationship with fire. In our ever-hotter, more flammable world, in which regions historically less affected by such disasters are now on the front lines of this growing environmental crisis, most recently in California, they reflect on what needs to be done to tackle the climate emergency.

Drawing on his international bestselling book Fire Weather, the story of the brutal urban wildfire of Fort McMurray that turned entire neighbourhoods into firebombs and drove 90,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon, Vaillant delves into the lives irrevocably altered by these disasters.

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The Inside Scoop: Magnus Linklater, Allan Little and Sally Magnusson
For a one-off special festival event, we will bring together three influential commentators who have been eyewitnesses to recent history and have all reported on the revolving door at No. 10 throughout the last decade of political turbulence.

Magnus Linklater and Allan Little, in conversation with Sally Magnusson, will reveal in an ‘off the record’ forum their insider take on the shifting sands of today’s world, as well as offering their invaluable insights into the months to come.

There might also be an opportunity to find out how each of them began!

Magnus Linklater was on the renowned Sunday Times insight team, breaking many scoops and political and public policy scandals including the tragedy of thalidomide. He is a highly respected journalist and former newspaper editor, who continues to write on political and cultural matters to do with Scotland. 

Allan Little spent the majority of his career at the BBC as a Foreign and War Correspondent covering major world political and international events leaving in 2014 to pursue a freelance career.

Sally Magnusson is a Scottish broadcaster and journalist, who started life as a political and current affairs reporter before becoming a renowned television presenter. She has also forged a career as one of Scotland’s most original historical novelists.

Expect the unexpected from this scintillating trio!

In remembrance of the 80th anniversary of Victory over Japan Day (VJ Day) 2/9/1945

'This is a superb book.' - James Holland

War of Empires: Japan is a sweeping saga of the longest and possibly most savage campaign of World War II.

In 1941 and 1942 the British and Indian Armies were brutally defeated and Japan reigned supreme in its newly conquered territories throughout Asia. But change was coming. New commanders such as Generals Alexander, Auchinleck and Slim were appointed, and tactics were developed including a new volunteer Indian Army who fought ferociously to turn the tide of war.

But the first victory did not come until March 1944, when the years of rebuilding paid off with the defeat of the Japanese at Kohima and Imphal as they staged their famed but doomed 'March on Delhi'. Further extraordinary victories followed culminating in Mandalay in May 1945 and the collapse of all Japanese forces in Burma.

Tracing this so-called 'Forgotten War', acclaimed historian Robert Lyman reveals it to be a ferocious clash of competing visions of empire, which would irrevocably change the future of both Britain and the Indian subcontinent forever.

Introduced by Peter Kennerley

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