DAME Judi Dench, the acclaimed actress of stage and screen, is to be appear at the eighth running of the Boswell Book Festival this year.
The Ayrshire festival of biography and memoir will again be staged this year at Dumfries House from May 4 to 6.
Dame Judi will talk about her life and career in a conversation with the director of the Citizen's Theatre, Dominic Hill, on May 5.
The festival, for which The Herald is a media partner, will also include the best selling author Anthony Horowitz, Sally Magnusson, Matthew Parris, and Helen Pankhurst, the women’s rights activist and great-granddaughter of suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst.
Alexander McCall Smith will celebrate the 20th year since the publication of his No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series and Cardinal Vincent Nichols discusses his life and work from his fight against human trafficking and slavery to his interest in sacred music, in conversation with composer Sir James MacMillan.
Other writers include Maggie O'Farrell, the Costa Novel Award winner as well as Andrew O'Hagan and Darren McGarvey, also known as the rapper Loki, whose book Poverty Safari has been a success this year.
The newspaper cartoonist Michael Heath will talk about his career of 60 years in Fleet Street.
Other attendees will be the Makar, Jackie Kay, Judy Murray, WW2 Veterans of the Arctic Convoys, and Chris Mullin.
Caroline Knox, director of the festival, said: "This is our biggest most ambitious, and star-studded programme in the eight years of the Festival.
"It is brimming with life stories that span a Dame, a Yogi, a Cardinal and a Rapper, a mix which would have delighted Ayrshire’s James Boswell, the inventor of modern biography.
"Once again, Dumfries House is the welcoming backdrop to the weekend where I predict creative sparks with fly as the power of the written word is let loose in one of Scotland’s great Enlightenment Houses.
"Turning our attention to future generations of readers and thinkers is always very high on our agenda and as usual our Children’s Festival places great emphasis on leading children to books over two action-packed days."
Tickets go on sale from March 15.
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