Book festival announces line-up

WIGTOWN Book Festival launched its 2025 programme this week with hopes it’ll be its largest and most varied programme ever.

The 10-day gathering takes place from Friday September 26 to Sunday October 5 and will feature 200-plus events and activities in Scotland’s National Book Town. These include author talks, wild-swimming, night walks and a sauna in a bookshop garden.

Closing this year’s festival will be much-loved comedians Julie Wilson Nimmo – known for her role as Miss Hoolie on Balamory – and Greg Hemphill of Chewin’ the Fat and Still Game will discuss their new guide to wild swimming in Scotland, which accompanies their BBC TV series Jules and Greg’s Wild Swim.

Julie is excited to be heading to Wigtown this Autumn.

She said: “We’ve always loved the sound of the Wigtown Book Festival and now we finally get to go. We’re really looking forward to it. It’s such a great line-up of authors, and there’s so much more going on even beyond the book events.

“Plus the Galloway coast is so beautiful, we’ll doubtless be off for a swim while we’re there.”

Other well-known names appearing at this year’s festival include former Scotland First Minister Nicola Sturgeon in conversation with Gavin Esler, Del Amitri frontman Justin Currie, stand-ups Helen Lederer and Robin Ince, broadcasters Reeta Chakrabarti and Louise Minchin, ex-chancellor of the exchequer Jeremy Hunt and performance poet and Scots language sensation Len Pennie.

As ever, the festival offers a strong focus on new Scottish writing. It includes daily afternoon poetry slots and the return of its environment-focused “Change the Stories” strand, as well as welcoming some of the UK’s most acclaimed non-fiction writers including Anne Sebba, Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Kate Summerscale, Andrew Lownie, Suzanne O’Sullivan and Horatio Clare.

The winners of the Wigtown Poetry Prizes and the Anne Brown Essay Prize for Scotland will be announced during the festival, while Professor Sir John Kay will deliver the James Mirrlees lecture, in honour of the Galloway-born Nobel Prize-winner.

Other events that give the festival its distinctive flavour are the return of the Wigtown’s Got Talent contest, a mobile sauna in a bookshop garden, a unique evening of storytelling at Bladnoch Distillery, a mass wild-swim with author Vicky Allan, and the now traditional opening-night fireworks display and pipe band.

Adrian Turpin, the festival’s outgoing creative director, added: “Wigtown gives audiences the chance to enjoy famous names, new writers, great storytelling, big ideas and colourful characters in intimate surroundings at the heart of Scotland’s National Book Town. The festival prides itself on being friendly, laid-back, full of surprises and intensely curious. Dive and and you never know what you will find.”