Edinburgh Book Festival starts 15 August: six dates to plan

The Edinburgh International Book Festival runs from 15 to 30 August at the University of Edinburgh’s Edinburgh Futures Institute, with 15 events from The Front List series also taking place at McEwan Hall. The programme will particularly suit readers interested in literature, technology, language, history and wellbeing.

Price, booking, event times, street addresses, transport guidance and accessibility arrangements are not stated in the University source. Visitors should confirm those details before attending.

More than 600 events sit beneath the 2026 theme, “Changing Your Mind”, an invitation to remain curious and consider unfamiliar perspectives. According to University of Edinburgh News, this is the festival’s third year based at the Edinburgh Futures Institute, while the University is also a major sponsor.

Six dates that map the University programme

The University-linked programme moves between debates about digital life and conversations grounded in language, literature and care.

On Saturday 15 August, Scots poet Len Pennie and journalist Sophia Smith Galer will consider bilingual identity, disappearing languages and the culture that can be lost alongside them.

Monday 17 August brings one of the programme’s most topical combinations. Journalist Gabriel Gatehouse will chair a conversation between Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and technology activist Cory Doctorow about the online forces shaping everyday life. The session forms part of The Front List at McEwan Hall.

Translation takes centre stage on Wednesday 19 August. Writers and translators Polly Barton, Daniel Hahn and Anton Hur will examine what happens to a book as it travels between languages.

On Friday 21 August, Financial Times journalist Sarah O’Connor and social innovator Hilary Cottam will turn to employment, considering how artificial intelligence and changing ways of working may affect jobs.

Literature, empathy and wellbeing meet on Sunday 23 August in a festival edition of The Compassion Salon. The Edinburgh Medical 300 event features healthcare academic Marti Balaam, GP Gavin Francis, poet Hollie McNish and Edinburgh Makar Michael Pedersen.

The final highlighted date is Saturday 29 August, when writers Elif Shafak and Valeria Luiselli join Anne Beate Hovind and artist Katie Paterson to explore Future Library. The Oslo public-art project has collected one original manuscript annually since 2014 and is intended to continue until 2114. The discussion will also reveal the next author chosen to contribute.

Technology, translation and a Scottish historical story

The Edinburgh Futures Institute is supporting festival conversations connected to its work on digital skills, data and AI literacy. That thread runs from Wales and Doctorow’s examination of the online world to O’Connor and Cottam’s discussion of technology at work.

Other sessions look at how stories survive movement across time, place and language. Scottish crime writer Val McDermid and Geographer Royal for Scotland Jo Sharp will join journalist Allan Little to discuss This Door of the Seas, their fictional retelling of an unexpected episode in Scottish history.

Together, the language and translation sessions offer another route through the “Changing Your Mind” theme: one asks what disappears when a language is eroded, while the other examines the choices involved when literature crosses linguistic boundaries.

Edinburgh Futures Institute and McEwan Hall share the programme

The Edinburgh Futures Institute remains the main festival site and hosts the wider programme of more than 600 events. McEwan Hall provides the setting for 15 Front List appearances, including the 17 August discussion with Wales, Doctorow and Gatehouse.

Anyone building a visit around the opening Saturday can also use GlobeBids’ Edinburgh opening-day guide. The confirmed University-linked sequence then continues with technology on 17 and 21 August, translation on 19 August, The Compassion Salon on 23 August and Future Library on 29 August.

Source: University of Edinburgh News