Edinburgh Excitement

The last few weeks have been most exciting chez MoominPoll. I've just had a delightful two weeks work experience placement with Orion Publishing and enjoyed every second of it, met lots of lovely people and gained some really great experience. Not to mention some really great new books; I just read Shadow and Bone, the first in the Grisha books by Leigh Bardugo but it's so good that it definitely deserves a post of its own.

Not only this, but the end of June marks the start of my favourite time of the year with the announcement of the programme for Edinburgh International Book Festival. This is my fifth year working at the festival and I love it - three weeks surrounded by books and people who love them as much as I do, Unbound in the Speigltent and wangled whisky vouchers and a hugely diverse programme of events. The weather is usually less than ideal - a family of rubber ducks usually make their home in some particularly swampy corner of Charlotte Square - but in true British spirit, we just get on with it! So naturally I was very keen to see the programme when it was announced last Thursday. I was not disappointed. It's a brilliant selection, even by EIBF's very high standards and I am so excited for August now. So I thought I'd do a quick post of the events I'm most excited about seeing, work timetable notwithstanding, with more than a little skewing towards the children's events.

1. Hadley Freeman: I recently read Be Awesome and really enjoyed it, so I was delighted to see that she'd be in Edinburgh on the 18th. The book is presented as a collection of essays and observations, and if she's half as funny in person as she is on paper this is set to be a really great event.

Maybe Judith Kerr's most famous creature?

2. Margaret Atwood: The Blind Assassin: I'm almost certainly not going to be able to see this one, never mind what ticket sales are doing, due to its time but I can be excited anyway right? The Blind Assassin is my favourite novel by Atwood (and up there in my list of favourite novels), and I love the way it weaves different  texts: diary entries, newspaper clippings, extracts from the novel within the novel.
3. Judith Kerr: The inimitable Judith Kerr celebrates her 90th birthday this summer, and she has published a beautiful illustrated celebration of her life and work. Part autobiography, part collection of illustrations, I saw Judith Kerr's Creatures while I was on placement with HarperCollins Children's Books and it is just gorgeous! The author has had a long, exciting life, starting with her childhood in Berlin and I'm sure her talk will be just fascinating.

Laura Dockrill

4. Meg Rosoff - I'm a fully paid-up Rosoff fan and I've seen her speak a couple of times at the book festival, and always enjoyed it.
5. Thursday 22nd August is the day I'm most looking forward to in terms of the children's programme. It has recently appointed BookTrust blogger Laura Dockrill talking about her first children's book Darcy Burdock, the lovely Kate Greenaway medal-winning author-illustrator Catherine Rayner, this year's illustrator-in-residence Barroux, whose book Mr Leon's Paris is a beautiful taxi journey round the world AND the wonderful Simon Bartram creator of Bob, the Man in the Moon. Really, really great. I kind of hope it's my day off so that I can spend it just going to kids' events...

These are just a very small percentage of a very full programme - more than 800 events with more than 700 authors - but I think the programme team have outdone themselves this year. Bravo all, and bring on August!