ED2013 Three To See ED2013 Week0 Edition ED2013 Words & Events

Three To See 2013: Book Festival

By Caro Moses | Published on Thursday 25 July 2013

ThreeWeeks Co-Editor presents her three top tips for this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival.

Jane Gardam (pictured)
I’d like to go to this event because I am a big fan of Whitbread winner and Booker nominee Jane Gardam; I began reading her children’s books many years ago, before making my way through some of her adult novels, and I am keen to read her latest, ‘Last Friends’, the final book in her ‘Old Filth’ trilogy. Enough about me though. She was in her late thirties before she published her first novel, so that should be inspiring for all those who feel they’ve got a few books in them waiting to come out. Like, er, me.
Charlotte Square Gardens, 14 Aug, 11.30am.

Andrew Wilson
Here’s another one that’s all about me. But also all about him. And Sylvia Plath. I recently, finally, got around to actually reading ‘The Bell Jar’ after avoiding it a bit, if I’m honest (I was scared). Poet and biographer Andrew Wilson is doing two events, one of which is a reading workshop about Plath’s seminal work; that’s the one I’m most keen to go to, but I’d really like to go to the other one, ‘Plath before Hughes’, too.
Charlotte Square Gardens, 16 Aug, 1.00pm.

Simon Garfield
Simon Garfield is the author of ‘Just My Type’, that critically acclaimed book about Fonts. But last year he published ‘On The Map: Why The World Looks The Way It Does’, and it’s this topic that he’d dealing with at this particular Book Festival event. “Google Maps may still be based on the Mercator projection of 1569” says the programme blurb, “but, Garfield argues, we are currently living through the biggest mapping revolution since the 15th century.” Sounds fascinating.
Charlotte Square Gardens, 18 Aug, 10.30am.