Ullapool Book Festival set for anticipated comeback with international line-up after three-year wait
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A WESTER ROSS literary event will be back in May after three years of hiatus.
Ullapool Book Festival will open the doors of the village hall on Friday, May 6, to welcome audiences back to the event.
Catriona Martin of the festival committee said: “We are proud of the programme we managed to put together in the face of various obstacles along the way. It’s going to be a great weekend!”
A spokesperson for the festival said that when the committee and volunteers stood outside the hall at the end of the 2019 festival having a group photo taken none of them would have believed it would be three years before they would be back.
But they have bounced back with a programme that equals that of any of the previous festivals with writers, poets, and musicians not only from Scotland but also from Northern Ireland (Jan Carson), Estonia (Triin Soomets) and Canada (Ian Williams) attending.
Jan Carson’s second novel, The Fire Starters (2019), won the EU Prize for Literature.
Her latest novel, The Raptures, cements her reputation as one of the most exciting and inventive writers of her generation with reviews such as “An original work that’s equal parts terrifying, hilarious and memorable” from the Times.
Poet Triin Soomets is the author of 20 books. Her work has been widely anthologized and translated into more than twenty languages. She was awarded the Estonian Cultural Endowment Award in 2014 and has won or been nominated for many other awards and honours.
Ian Williams' debut novel Reproduction won the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize (Canada’s leading award for fiction; previous winners include Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro). His debut nonfiction work, Disorientation, was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Award. His poetry collection, Personals, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and his new collection, Word Problems, won the Raymond Souster Award. Ian Williams is this year’s Visiting Fellow at the American Library in Paris.
Full details of all the other guests are detailed in the programme on the festival website www.ullapoolbookfestival.co.uk .
Online and phone tickets close on Thursday 5 May at 8pm. If there are tickets still available for any of the sessions they will be on sale at a festival tent outside the village hall from 9am on the Friday of the festival, however there is no guarantee there will be any and they cannot be reserved beforehand.
