Jonathan Safran Foer, Judith Kerr and Gordon Brown are among the scheduled appearances, which the event’s director says will be ‘about creative ideas and imagining a better world’
More than 800 writers, politicians, actors and scientists, from Eimear McBride and Jonathan Safran Foer to Gordon Brown and Thomas Keneally, will gather at the Edinburgh international book festival this August, where they will address issues from the EU referendum to the refugee crisis.
“This year’s festival is about the desire for us to engage in bold, positive, creative thinking about what we want the world to be like,” said director of the festival Nick Barley as he unveiled a programme that also features the actor Alan Cumming, Scots makar Jackie Kay and Man Booker International prize winner Han Kang, from Korea. “If you look at the political discourse in Britain, around the EU referendum and the Syrian refugees, it has been characterised by fear and negativity. And I don’t believe that the great steps forward for the human race have ever been made on the basis of fear.”
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