Scotsman arts correspondent Jane Bradley meets Edinburgh International Book Festival director Jenny Niven at the launch of the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
00:00I'm Jane Bradley, Arts Correspondent at The Scotsman and I'm here today at the launch of the Edinburgh International Book Festival at the Futures Institute.
00:09I'm here today with Jenny Niven who is Director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Hi Jenny.
00:14Hello.
00:15Just wondered if you can tell us a little bit about the highlights in the book festival this year.
00:19Yep, we are absolutely thrilled to be back here at the Edinburgh Futures Institute which is where we are today.
00:24And we will have a full programme of almost 700 events over our two weeks from the 9th to the 25th of August both in the amazing spaces at the Futures Institute and out on the beautiful grassy courtyard facing the meadows as well.
00:40And as you might expect we've got things from every single topic imaginable.
00:54And have you made any changes to the book festival this year?
00:56It's obviously still sort of settling at the new home at the Edinburgh Futures Institute.
01:00Yeah, so our key kind of programme theme this year is repair.
01:05And so I suppose one of the things that we're trying to do is to make the programme, because it is a lot of events and it's very dense,
01:12so it's now much more clearly themed so that hopefully audiences can find straight away their way into the programme and find what really appeals to them.
01:20But our overarching theme for this year is repair because we would like the conversations that we have and the writers that we invite to feel hopeful and to let people think about,
01:32yeah, there's lots of problems in society and across politics and mental health and everything at the moment.
01:36But there are very clever people out there who are helping us to think our way through them,
01:41giving us alternative ideas and different viewpoints on how we might move forward.
01:45So hopefully people will come and find something that challenges them, but also ultimately uplifts them.
