eibf | Tales of One City

Lots of young readers brought their special soft toys along to Edinburgh International Book Festival on Friday for our very first teddy bear sleepover. Author Linda Strachan brought Hamish McHaggis!

After some songs and stories the children tucked their toys up and left them to settle down for the night.

Or so they thought. Almost as soon as Linda had left the room the teddies were getting up to all kinds of mischief…

They enjoyed Linda’s story so much they thought they’d sneak a look at her web site.

Snip introduced his new friends to his favourite titles at the bookshop.

Look! Doctor Book! Everyone queued nicely for a reading prescription.

“Antony Beevor? Any relation?”

All this was hungry work. Might there be some food at the authors’ yurt?

Bingo!

“This is my first trip to the book festival. How about you?”.

And off to bed, although Snip’s snoring made Big Ted wish he’d brought his earplugs.

You can see more of the teddies’ adventures on Flickr.

“Libraries matter to everything we do” Nick Barley, Director, Edinburgh International Book Festival

Edinburgh Central library was the venue for one of the most important events in the global literary calendar yesterday – the programme launch for this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival. A packed room heard that the theme of this year’s programme is ‘Revolution in the twenty-first century’.

Among the stellar list of names appearing at this year’s festival are exiled Chinese Nobel Laureate Gao Xingjian, postmodern trailblazer Robert Coover and the genre-defying Neil Gaiman.

Scottish literary talent is well represented, with the world premier of Alasdair Gray’s Fleck read by a cast including Liz Lochhead, Will Self, A L Kennedy, Ian Rankin and Alasdair himself, promising to be one of the highlights. The children’s programme, with a series of events selected by newly appointed children’s laureate Julia Donladson, is also guaranteed to be wildly popular.

Tickets go on sale on 26 June so we suggest the following:

1. Pick up a copy of the programme from your library or view it online at the EIBF web site

2. Borrow books by the featured authors or find out more about them on the fantastic Literature Resource Center!