Hilary: Edinburgh International Book Festival

There is less than a month until the Edinburgh International Book Festival gets under way. This week Hilary Copeland, the festival's Programme Assistant, drops by the blog to fill us in on the hectic weeks ahead and the authors she is looking forward to seeing. Have you booked your tickets yet?

Next month. NEXT MONTH! The pressure definitely ramps up a notch for all of our staff at this time of year now that the 2010 Edinburgh International Book Festival is less 5 weeks away. 

It takes a whole year to plan every Book Festival, and by July, we’ve already put quite a lot of the festival in place.

The Programming Team have already figured out what authors, illustrators, journalists, poets, storytellers and generally brilliant people we want to invite; we’ve invited them; they’ve said yes and we’ve told them when and where and with whom we would like them to do an event.

So it sounds like we could just rock up on 14^th August and see what happens, right?

Not quite. Because we have lots of different departments furiously working away at this very moment, making loads of things happen that you might not even know about if I didn’t tell you about them. So for starters –

You can’t have a Book Festival without books, so our Booksales team have been ordering over 8000 different titles to sell in our three lovely bookshops that are open every day of the festival. With over 60,000 books sold during 18 days, that’s a lot of books to order!

Our Press & Marketing team are doing their utmost to make sure that everyone in the outside world gets to hear about the fantastic line up of events that we’ve put together – look out for us in the paper, on TV and the radio, as well as on Twitter and our own blog.

We have to create our entire site from the ground up, so our Site & Technical Managers are making sure they have everything in place beforehand, or we wouldn’t have anywhere for our authors to go! This includes everything from building all of our own venues to ordering enough toilet roll for all of our customers – did you know that in 2009 we got through over 5000 rolls??

And that’s not to mention all of our trusty team who are selling tickets, bringing in funding, organising our authors’ visits and looking after our office. 

So there’s still plenty to do before the very first event even opens!

Which of course brings me to what it’s all about – the events. As I work on the children & schools programmes, my top picks are:

Garth Nix – an amazing Australian fantasy writer making a rare UK appearance at our opening event!

Cornelia Funke – creator of the brilliant Inkworld trilogy who’s back with an exclusive peek at her new book – it’ll make you rethink everything you thought you knew about fairy tales.

Louise Rennison – from the pen that brought you Georgia Nicholson comes Tallulah Casey and her mates at a performing arts summer camp. They’re dreaming of Fame…only they’re all rubbish.

And we’ve also got brilliant teen writers like Patrick Ness, Meg Rosoff, Robert Muchamore, Keith Gray, John Green, Cathy Forde, Marcus Sedgwick – not to mention amazing authors and illustrators for younger kids like Julia Donaldson, Catherine Rayner, Michael Rosen, Andy Stanton… Plus, we have some incredible first time authors and names from overseas, like Barry Hutchison, Isobelle Carmody, John Smelcer, Samantha Mackintosh, Tohby Riddle – if you haven’t heard of them yet, grab a ticket to one of their events, and say you saw them first.

And there are only about, ooh, 200 more events for children and young people. And only 27 days to go until it all kicks off.

Yikes. We’d best get cracking then.

Visit the Edinburgh International Book Festival's website to download the 2010 guide and to book your tickets now!

Other News:

Eoin Colfer will be doing a number of events throughout the country this coming week. You can see him in Bristol, Newcastle and Harrogate. Check out his website to see when he will be appearing near you.

You can see a teaser video for the seventh book in the Artemis Fowl series here!

Our Online Teacher in Residence Michael Stephenson has produced some excellent new resources using film and computer game adaptations for developing critical literacy. This is in addition to his earlier unit on graphic modules. You can download the resources from our website here.

You may also wish to follow us on Twitter and Facebook to get all the latest news from Scottish Book Trust.