Islay Book Festival 2024: Full Lineup Announced

We are thrilled to fully unveil another stellar lineup for this year’s Islay Book Festival!

Islay Book Festival 2024 Line Up

Author of Mayflies, Andrew O’Hagan, will open our festival in style on Thursday 29 August, answering questions about his new novel, Caledonian Road, from Ileach and BBC Scotland political editor Glenn Campbell.

On Friday 30 August, peat scientist Mike Billett will hold a distillery event in the afternoon, while the evening will see a lively conversation between crime fiction superstars Chris Brookmyre and Denise Mina.

Saturday 31 August will start with a sea swimming session hosted by adventurer and author of Blue Scotland, Mollie Hughes.* Sue Lawrence will present her new historical novel Lady’s Rock, set on Mull and Islay. A panel on the theme of ‘Welcoming Nature’ will feature Mollie Hughes, Orkney-based nature writer Victoria Bennett, and poet Alycia Pirmohamed. Concomitantly to this event, children’s author Maisie Chan will hold a fun-filled session adapted to children with additional needs.

Gaelic poetry and translation will both be in the spotlight with a conversation between Taylor Strickland, winner of the Scottish Poetry Book of the Year Award 2023, and Niall O’Gallagher, current An Comunn Gàidhealach Bard.

We will celebrate the 75th anniversary of George Orwell’s 1984 with a special event moderated by the novelist’s son and Chair of the Orwell Society, Richard Blair. Les Wilson, author of Orwell’s Island: George, Jura and 1984, and Gary Younge, winner of the Orwell’s Prize for Journalism 2023, will both feature as participants.

On Sunday 1 September, there will be a poetry walk with Alycia Pirmohamed, organised in partnership with the Islay Natural History Trust. Ronald Black and David Caldwell will co-present their respective forthcoming books, John Dewar’s Islay, Jura and Colonsay and The Archaeology of Finlaggan. Author of All My Wild Mothers: Motherhood, Loss and An Apothecary Garden, Victoria Bennett, will be in conversation with local author Tracey Hunter on the themes of grief, nature and healing.

There will be an afternoon tea with Sue Lawrence, who will tell us all about her new Scottish baking book, featuring a few Islay bakers in its pages. And finally, we’re hugely honoured that BBC journalist and presenter Clive Myrie has accepted to join us to talk about his memoir, Everything is Everything, with Lord George Robertson of Port Ellen.

As well as this general programme, there will be a substantial school programme as usual, with authors Alan Windram, Maisie Chan, Nadine Aisha Jassat, Linda NicLeòid and Mollie Hughes visiting pupils from nursery to senior students. Author Victoria Bennett will also pay a visit to the residents at Gortanvogie Residential Home.

Please sign up to our newsletter for our announcement about event timings, locations and ticketing in due course.

See you all in August!

* Subject to confirmation

IBF Authors on the Highland Book Prize Longlist

The Highland Book Prize has announced its 2023 Longlist, and several IBF authors feature. Alan Warner, Kapka Kassabova and Sally Huband are all past or future authors appearing at the Festival. Well done to all the authors on the longlist!

The prize is presented by the Highland Society of London and Moniack Mhor, Scotland’s National Writing Centre, and celebrates literature that comes from the rich landscape and culture of the Scottish Highlands and Islands. This includes books written by authors who live in the Highlands or were born there, as well as books whose content is Highland themed.

Twelve books were selected from 76 eligible submitted titles by a team of volunteer readers with a diverse range of backgrounds and experience, in conjunction with the judging panel, Moniack Mhor, and the Highland Society of London.

For more information, visit Highland Book Prize.

Another highlight of our 2024 festival

Islay Book Festival are thrilled to bring you another highlight of this year’s festival… a very special event around George Orwell! It will be chaired by the author’s son and Patron of the Orwell Society, Richard Blair (pictured), to mark the 75th anniversary of the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. One thing we can already tell you is that Les Wilson, author of Orwell’s Island: George, Jura and 1984, will be joining the conversation. More details about this event organised in partnership with The Orwell Society and the other authors taking part will be announced soon.

Unveiling our 2023 programme!

The Islay Book Festival committee members have been busy bees in the last few months, and we are so very happy to unveil our 2023 programme!

This year’s festival, including school and children’s events, will take place from Thursday 7 to Sunday 10 September.

Our general programme at the Gaelic College will kick off on Friday 8 September for a special evening with the Hebridean Baker, sponsored by Jura Distillery. Expect Gaelic singing, stories, recipes, a cocktail demonstration, and even a baking competition!

On Saturday, Kapka Kassabova will start the day off with an event fittingly sponsored by The Botanist around her stunning new book Elixir, which focuses on the wild plant gatherers of the valley of the Mesta in her native Bulgaria.

The next speaker will bring us back closer to our shores. Angus Peter Campbell will talk about his new novel in English, Electricity, a beautiful ode to island life, as well as tell us what it was like to translate George Orwell’s Animal Farm into the Gaelic Tuathanas nan Creutairean.

The afternoon will see us move on to poetry as Gerda Stevenson reads from her latest collection, Tomorrow’s Feast, which centres on the legacy faced by the next generation.

After poetry, romance will be in the spotlight as the Scottish queen of ‘Feel Good Fiction’, Jenny Colgan, presents The Summer Skies, her new escapist stand-alone novel set in the Scottish islands.

And to wrap up this busy day, what could be better than a fascinating Tartan Noir panel? Marisa Haetzman, writing under the pseudonym Ambrose Parry with husband Chris Brookmyre, will be in conversation with Sarah Smith, to chat about their respective historical fictions, Voices of the Dead and Hear No Evil.

On Sunday, Alan Warner will take us on a famous Hebridean journey in Scottish history as he discusses Nothing Left to Fear from Hell, his latest short novel about Bonnie Prince Charlie’s escape after the Battle of Culloden.

Chitra Ramaswamy will follow with what promises to be a moving event about her book Homelands, inspired by her friendship with Holocaust survivor Henry Wuga, who escaped Nazi Germany as part of the Kindertransport to settle in Glasgow.

Our Sunday afternoon session will be all about palaeontology, as Steve Brusatte presents his two popular science books The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs and The Rise and Reign of the Mammals, drawing from the fossil discoveries Steve and his team have made on the Isle of Skye over the past decade.

Alongside this exciting general programme, Gerda Stevenson will run a poetry workshop at Ardbeg Distillery on Sunday afternoon (booking essential as places are limited), and there will also be two children’s events: Anne and Steve Brusatte will visit MYFOS in Port Ellen on Thursday for an after-school session around their picture book Dugie the Dinosaur, while Philip Reeve will present his Utterly Dark middle-grade series at the Mactaggart Leisure Centre on Sunday afternoon.

Our varied school programme will include sessions with Lari Don, Sarah McIntyre, Philip Reeve, Anne and Steve Brusatte, and Angus Peter Campbell for a visit to the Gaelic Medium Unit. Alan Warner, Sarah McIntyre and Philip Reeve will also visit the students of Islay High School. 

And Gerda Stevenson will bring poetry and songs to the residents of Gortanvogie Care Home.

Mindful of the cost of living crisis, we’ve kept the price of tickets for our general programme low at £5 (£3.50 concession) per event, and, for best value, you can also purchase a festival pass for £30 (£20). Children’s events at MYFOS and the Mactaggart Leisure Centre are free. 

For more information about the individual events and to find out exact times and book tickets, click here.

We hope to see many of you join us in September for a big celebration of words and stories!

Support us with Argyll Community Lottery

We’ve launched an Argyll Community Lottery page! As a charity, the Islay Book Festival relies solely on funding from our sponsors and the generosity of the public. You can now support us in a fun way by purchasing Argyll Community Lottery tickets here: https://www.argyllcommunitylottery.co.uk/support/islay-book-festival.

Tickets cost only £1, with a draw every Saturday night. Each ticket has a 1 in 50 chance to win, with prizes ranging from free extra tickets to £25,000. When someone chooses us as their cause, 50% goes to us, 20% to admin costs, 20% to prizes and the remaining 10% is shared between all the other good causes registered with the lottery, so it means it benefits other local charities as well.

We hope many of you will choose to support us this way, and wish you good luck in the lottery. Gun robh math agaibh!

Revealing our 2023 line-up!

Our committee has been busy putting together an exciting line-up for this year’s Islay Book Festival on 8-10 September, and we couldn’t wait to share the names of our guest authors with you ahead of the busy season.

Coinneach MacLeod, aka The Hebridean Baker, will open the festivities with his stories and recipes.

Tartan noir will be well represented, with the presence of Ambrose Parry and Sarah Smith.

Jenny Colgan will come to argue that Scotland, and its islands in particular, are a great setting for romance, not only for murder.

Multi-talented Angus Peter Campbell will present his latest novel in English, chat about translating George Orwell into Gaelic, and possibly share a bit about his acting career.

Gerda Stevenson will put poetry on the programme, while Alan Warner will regale us with the Hebridean adventures of Bonnie Prince Charlie.

British and European history will feature prominently in Chitra Ramaswamy’s event, while Kapka Kassabova will tell us what the Bulgarian forests hold in common with the Scottish Highlands.

Palaeontologist Steve Brusatte will talk about the history of life on Earth, and be joined by his wife Anne to visit Islay schools with their picture book inspired by the Isle of Skye’s fossil finds. Star storyteller Lari Don will undoubtedly delight pupils’ imagination. And last but not least, super duo Sarah McIntyre & Philip Reeve will be back to the island to present their new series.

Needless to say, we have a fantastic programme in the works for you, and we’ll be back soon with more detailed information about all our authors’ books and individual events. Stay tuned!

Donald S Murray talks peatlands

Donald S Murray is the author of two critically-acclaimed novels set on his native Isle of Lewis. His debut, As The Women Lay Dreaming, which deals with the aftermath of the tragic sinking of the Iolaire, a ship carrying island soldiers home from World War I, won the Paul Torday Memorial Prize.

His latest work, In a Veil of Mist, which The Times described as a “moving portrait of a place and its people,” is set in 1950s Lewis against the backdrop of Operation Cauldron, the secret testing of biological weapons on animals on board a ship anchored in the Minch.

Donald is also a poet and a prolific producer of non-fiction writing, much of it dealing with the nature and cultural heritage of the Hebrides. In 2018 he came to the Islay Book Festival with his book The Dark Stuff: Stories from the Peatlands and he’ll be joining us again via Zoom on 10 June to share some of his latest poetry while exploring how peat landscapes and the peat-cutting tradition have given his work the flavour of an Islay whisky.

As a taster for that event, part of the Islay and Jura Peatlands Project being run by the Islay Natural History Trust, the festival’s Angus MacKinnon caught up with Donald for a chat about all things peat, his latest projects and life under lockdown.

Continue reading “Donald S Murray talks peatlands”

Islay Book Festival: 2021 update

We have reluctantly decided to cancel this year’s event due to the continuing uncertainty over travel and other restrictions linked to the Covid pandemic.

We are not confident of being able to hold a physical festival towards the end of the summer and so have decided to cut our losses and cancel now.

And while we learnt a lot from our online programme last year, and are incredibly grateful for everyone’s contributions and support from across the globe, our feeling is that live events on the island are really what our festival is all about and we don’t want to move too far away from that.

We also feel there is no point trying to compete in a now very cluttered digital landscape.

However, we have decided instead to try and organise some one-off book events this year to support a couple of local publications coming out in May and June respectively. These events will most likely be held online over the summer months.

In the meantime, we’ll be working away in the background on a future strategy for the festival and in particular to try to secure longer-term funding for our activities. We look forward to coming back with a bang in 2022!

Two weeks left to watch our 2020 festival videos

A lot of conversations are being had at the moment about how long author videos should be kept online. Will anyone value the content if it’s available indefinitely? Would anyone pay to attend an online event if they can already watch the same author on YouTube for free?

We thought we’d take a stance and remove access to our 2020 festival events at the end of January. We want to encourage people to value  online author events as much as they would physical events, and we want to be fair to authors, audiences and other festivals hoping to engage online. This is our way of committing to a level playing field.

Please make the most of the next two weeks and catch up on last year’s wee digital Islay Book Festival while you can! You can find them all here.

AGM announced

The Islay Book Festival AGM will take place at 12 noon on Saturday 6 February. This is a delayed AGM from 2020, as due to various difficulties caused by Covid, we were unable to hold it before the end of the year. This AGM will therefore present on our 2019-20 activity, but will also include a summary of our 2020-21 activity so far to keep everyone up to date.

The AGM will be conducted on Zoom and is open to members and residents of Islay and Jura. If you would like to attend, please register here: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMpdOGtqjMvGdwdz_3dmHHPjjgFPYkn1uTE

Please do just get in touch if you have any queries or if you would like to attend but are not currently a member: hello[at]islaybookfestival.co.uk

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