HOLLYWOOD actor Alan Cumming, Scottish pop icon Edwyn Collins, American civil rights leader Jesse Jackson and First Minister Nicola Sturgeon will be among the main attractions at the Edinburgh International Book Festival this summer.
Pulitzer Prize-winning American author Marilynne Robinson, historical novelist Philippa Gregory and Wolf Hall star Mark Rylance are also lined up for the event.
Nicola Sturgeon will mark her debut at the event by revealing her passion for crime fiction in discussion with Val McDermid, after the festival asked her to choose a favourite author to appear alongside.
Tickets for this year’s festival go on public sale from 23 June.
Amateur detectives from around the world are being given the chance to help solve a murder mystery alongside one of the world’s leading forensic centres.
A new free, online course at Dundee University’s Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification (CAHID), has been launched which takes its inspiration from a fictional crime novel.
Scenes and scenarios from author Val McDermid’s latest story will be recreated with students being asked to solve the mystery as the case unfolds over six weeks.
The new course, which is known as a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), is open to anyone, free to take part in and is accessed online.
Val McDermid is one of the star guests at this year’s Bloody Scotland festival.
Wednesday 4th June 2015
Read this article by BRIAN FERGUSON on The Scotsman website.
Picture: Neil Hanna
SCOTLAND’S annual crime-writing festival is to explore whether men or women are better placed to write about murder, the painstaking investigation to capture the man behind the World’s End murders and the real-life poisons deployed by Agatha Christie to kill off characters.
An all-women panel of writers will be discussing whether men and women write and read crime differently, what they think about violence, and whether they are equally subjected to it at Stirling’s Bloody Scotland event in September.
