A conference of more than 50 leading writers, with the aim of re-establishing the capital as the world's foremost city of enlightened literary values, is at the heart of this year's Edinburgh International Book Festival.
The biggest book festival in the world, now in its third year under director Nick Barley, is to stage the Edinburgh World Writers' Conference in a partnership with the British Council, which will then take it on tour to book festivals in countries including Trinidad, Russia, Egypt, China, India, Australia and Canada, before returning to Edinburgh in 2013.
The conference, which will cost around £500,000 in total, is inspired by the conference of authors held in Edinburgh in 1962, organised by John Calder and Jim Haynes. They brought 70 authors to the capital, including Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Hugh MacDiarmid and Muriel Spark.
This year's conference in Edinburgh will feature debates with appearances by Ali Smith, Irvine Welsh, Ian Rankin, and a number of international writers.
Mr Barley, whose festival runs from August 11 to August 27, said: "Without wanting to put it too grandly, I think the world is reaching an important new point.
"We are at the beginning of a new era where it is clear that the market has failed and we are searching for a new way.
"I think this conference around the world will show what writers have to offer in that really important debate about how the world should be.
"Edinburgh's status as a city of ideas, as a city of literature, is going to reach new heights as a result of this project, and although it is a big budget for a project, it is of very good value in terms of raising the name of Edinburgh around the world."
He added: "I think it's fair to say that Edinburgh is a cultural hub of creative and intellectual ideas, and if you define Enlightenment as that, then we are in the middle of a new Enlightenment.
"That was triggered by Jim Haynes and John Calder all those years ago, and we are still benefiting from it now."
Other authors, writers, poets and thinkers attending the festival, which with more than 800 authors is the biggest yet, include Seamus Heaney, Ian McEwan, James Kelman, Pat Barker, Zadie Smith, Val McDermid, David Walliams, Mackenzie Crook, the former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and nine Booker Prize winners.
The thriller writer Wilbur Smith, whose books sell up to three million copies per title and are often set in Africa, is at the festival for the first time on August 25.
The festival will be replete with literary awards: the James Tait Black Memorial Prize will be announced at the Book Festival, together with the Edwin Morgan Poetry Prize and the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book of the Year award.
Tickets for the EIBF go on sale from June 29.
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