TWO major events are set to enhance Scottish literary circles.
More than 380 authors from around the world will attend the first annual Edinburgh Book Festival later this year and the country's richest and most prestigious literary award, the Scottish Writer of the Year prize, is to be sponsored by Stakis Hotels.
As revealed exclusively in The Herald last week, the hotels division of Glasgow-based Stakis plc is to take over the running of the prize.
Among the authors set to take part in the book festival - previously staged every two years - are brothers William and Hugh McIlvanney, John Mortimer, Andrew O'Hagen, Candia McWilliam, A L Kennedy, Alan Garner, and Iain Banks.
Foreign writers include Bernardo Atxaga, from Spain's Basque country, Margaret Atwood, from Canada, and Francisco Goldman, from South America.
Booker Prize winner Pat Barker will also be attending the 17-day event, which begins on August 9. The premiere of Regeneration, the film of the first book in her Regeneration Trilogy, which was shot on location in Scotland, will be shown in Edinburgh during the festival's run.
An exhibition of photo-graphs by Luis Poirot will feature the Isla Negra home in Chile of Nobel prize-winning poet, Pablo Neruda, and there will be an exhibition celebrating the life and work of Scottish writer, Naomi Mitchison, who is 100 years old this year.
There will also be a major children's festival featuring storytellers from Nigeria, Australia, Ireland, England, and Scotland.
This year, the book festival has secured around #100,000 worth of sponsorship from 33 different organisations, which have contributed from #100 upwards. The biggest grant, #127,000, has come from The Scottish Arts Council, with other five-figure sums being secured from The Post Office and The Bank of Scotland.
The future of the Scottish Writer of the Year prize had been in doubt after McVitie's, which had sponsored it for 10 years, ended its association shortly before this year's event was to be launched.
However, Stakis Hotels last night officially announced it was the new sponsor.
Managing director Anthony Harris said: ''Stakis Hotels is proud of its strong Scottish roots and rich Scottish heritage. Sponsoring this prestigious literary prize is an ideal opportunity to celebrate the wealth of writing talent which exists in Scotland today.''
Previous winners of the Scottish Writer of the Year award include Alan Spence, Janice Galloway, and Sorley Maclean.
The judging panel for this year's award will be chaired by poet and television producer Donny O'Rourke, who will be joined by Peter Kravitz, BBC Radio Scotland presenter and former Polygon and Edinburgh Review editor, and Robyn Marsack, freelance editor, author, and translator and member of the Scottish Arts Council literature committee.
The winner of the Stakis Prize will be announced in November. He or she will receive #10,000.
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