Lillie Art Gallery, Milngavie - Thursday 8th Sept - 7pm

Alan Wilson, RM Hubbert (music) and special guest Bernard MacLaverty.

Alan Wilson, a local lad from Baljaffray, writes short stories, novels and plays. He was selected via the open submissions process to appear in “The Year of Open Doors” and was shortlisted for the Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award in 2010. His first book “Wasted in Love, a collection of short stories, is due to be published by Cargo on 11^th October 2011.

St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, Park Road, Milngavie - Tuesday 6th Sept - 3pm

James Robertson, author of 'The Testament of Gideon Mack', reads from his epic novel 'And Land Lay Still' (winner of the Saltire prize, 2010) which charts 60 years of political, social and cultural change in Scotland from the end of the Second World War to the present day.

Tee/coffee included.

Lillie Art Gallery, Milngavie - Tuesday 6th Sept - 7pm for 7.30pm

Opening Reception followed by 'How did I get published?'

Includes glass of wine/soft drink.

Come and enjoy a glass of wine at our opening reception then take your seats in the gallery for Kaye Adams to declare the Milngavie Book & Arts Festival 2011 officially open. She will be followed by an exciting panel of new authors chaired by Leela Soma.

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Mugdock Country Park - Wednesday 7th Sept - 7pm

Fi Martynoga is a museum researcher, author and journalist, and a long-standing volunteer and board member of the environmental charity Reforesting Scotland, for whom she has compiled the Handbook of Scotland's Trees. She was also a contributing editor for Woodlanders: New Life in Britain's Forests. She is involved with her local Transition group and is the author of the Tweed Green Cookbook. She lives in the Borders, near Innerleithen.

NOTE: Tickets for this event are also available Mon-Fri from Mugdock Park Office.

Allander Church, Milngavie - Wednesday 7th Sept - 8pm

Event hosted by Milngavie Churches in association with the festival.

Ticket proceeds go to Preshal Trust.

May Nicholson was a notorious fighting drunk in Ferguslie Park, Paisley until her life changed when she was 34. The last 22 years have been spent tirelessly working as an outreach worker in Ferguslie Park, Church of Scotland Project Worker in Mid Craigie (a deprived area of Dundee) and now in Govan where she founded the Preshal (Gaelic for precious) Trust.

May's biography reads as though she is telling her story and is interspersed by accounts and comments from other people.

Mugdock Country Park - Thursday 8th Sept - 7pm

NOTE: Tickets for this event are also available Mon to Fri from Mugdock Park Office.

One of the strong threads that has linked both Peter`s work and leisure time, has been young people and the outdoors. With a career largely in youth work, and latterly running the Duke of Edinburgh`s Award in the Edinburgh area, he was also a co-founder of Youth in Trust (now NTS Conservation Volunteers and Thistle Camps), instigator of The Green Team, and co-founder of the John Muir Award, amongst a variety of other things. `Lets make it happen for young people` could well be his motto, because that is indeed what he has done. So he applied the same resolve to his own Watershed epic in 2005, with his trek along 1,200km of bog, rock, mountain, moor and forest - the genesis for Ribbon of Wildness - Discovering the Watershed of Scotland.  Sharing his experiences with others now pretty much fills his retirement.

Allander Church, Milngavie - Friday 9th Sept - 2pm

Includes tea/coffee and cream scone

Let Jess guide you through the ways of the misty wanderers. Share tales and reminiscences over cream tea with Jess, a truly charismatic speaker with innate storytelling ability. Share nights around campfires, taste virgin water at its source, listen to the weasel pierce the eardrums of the hypnotised rabbit. Hear the monarch of the glen as he challenges his foes at rutting. Watch in wonderment the rainbow coloured spine of a Scottish Salmon battling through rapids, onwards to her favoured spawning water.  Jess truly is the Scotia Bairn.

With Len Murray and Bill Patterson

Corbie Ha', Milngavie - Wednesday 7th Sept - 7.30pm

Bar Available.

The life and loves of Robert Burns: Scotland’s Bard in Words and song. In his short life, 37 years, he had written innumerable poems and over 300 songs and every one a gem. The story was written and is narrated by Len Murray One of Scotland's leading authorities on Robert Burns. Robert Burns was voted by the people of Scotland as the Scot of the Millennium.

The narrative is illustrated in songs and music by some of Scotland's most experienced musicians and folk singers who have come together as Tha Tighinn Fodham.

Allander Church, Milngavie - Friday 9th Sept - 4.00pm

Poetry, storytelling and music with Tawona Sithole and Leela Soma

Includes tea/coffee.

Tawona Sithole grew up with the oral tradition that celebrates the morals and lifestyle of his ancestral family, Moyo Chirandu. As a son of this family he is better known as Ganyamatope. Playing mbira music and poetry and sharing his heritage with others helps increase awareness of lesser-known perspectives of his experience. From Zimbabwe, living in Glasgow, he is co-founder of Seeds of Thought – a collective that aims to promote sharing of cultures through the arts.

Leela Soma is a local poet and novelist. Her first collection of poems' From Madras to Milngavie' raised money for Cancer Research. One of her poems has recently been published in the prize-winning literary magazine 'Gutter'. She has read her poems at the Courtyard Readings at the Edinburgh Festival,  various events in Glasgow and at Poetry Scotland Weekend in Callander. Leela's poems reflect the two cultures of Scotland and India.

Allander Church, Milngavie - Friday 9th Sept - 7.30pm

Banner in the West: A Spiritual History of Lewis and Harris

Event hosted by Milngavie churches in association with the festival.

The son of Lewis parents and the Free Church manse, John MacLeod was born in Lochaber in 1966 and educated at Jordanhill College School, Glasgow; James Gillespie's High School, Edinburgh; and Edinburgh University. After graduation in 1988 he fell quickly into freelance journalism 'by some sort of awful accident' and remains youngest ever Scottish Journalist of the Year (at twenty-five, in 1991). He has won a clutch of awards and has written for The Scotsman and The Herald. Since 2002 he has written a weekly column for the Scottish Daily Mail.

His seven books include Banner in the West: A Spiritual History of Lewis and Harris (2008); the acclaimed When I Heard the Bell: The loss of the Iolaire (2009) – which was shortlisted for the Saltire Prize; River of Fire: The Clydebank Blitz (2010) and None Dare Oppose: The Laird, the Beast and the People of Lewis. He returned to Stornoway in 1993.

Allander Church, Milngavie - Saturday 10th Sept - 11.00am

Includes tea/coffee.

In "River of Fire: The Clydebank Blitz", John seeks to redress the balance often seen between the bombing of Clydebank reduced to a footnote or a short paragraph in other historical works. In proportion to its size Clydebank suffered more damage than any other place in Britain during World War 2. John’s book not only tells the human story of those two terrible nights, but also explores the wider social and economic context and suggests why this very important event in the history of Britain during World War 2 was so marginalised by the media and the establishment.

Allander Church, Milngavie - Saturday 10th Sept - 1.00pm

Includes tea/coffee

Glasgow’s best selling memoirs 'Night Song of the Last Tram',  'Somewhere to Lay my Head' and 'At Her Majesty’s Pleasure', have consolidated Robert’s reputation as a most entertaining writer who combines the pithy and humorous with compassion and sentiment. With his usual blend of laughter and tears, Robert Douglas has delivered an engaging second  novel of tenement life set in Maryhill Road  ‘Staying on Past the Terminus’.

Glasgow 1961.
It is ten years since we last visited the close at 18 Dalbeattie Street in Maryhill.
The stalwarts are still there...Ella, Drena, Rhea and 'Granny' Thomson (86).
Irma the German war bride speaks fluent Scots nowadays. Well, 'fluent' if you were brought up in the same close as the Broons and Oor Wullie.
Glasgow's beloved trams still run on the Maryhill Road. But not for long. There will not be a tramcar left in Glasgow by the end of next year. The new tenant, Frank Galloway knows all about this - he's a driver. The other new arrival is Ruby Baxter who impresses no one with her attitude - as Granny Thomson says "She's no better than she ought to be, that yin!"

Allander Church, Milngavie - Saturday 10th Sept - 3.00pm

Includes tea/coffee.

Life of Pee.  It has made bread rise, beer foam, dyes stick and given us gunpowder, stained glass, Robin Hood's tunic and Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring. Soldiers in the trenches of Ypres used it as a gas mask, while cloth-makers from the Romans to weavers on the isle of Harris depended on it.

Broadcaster Sally Magnusson offers an exhilarating and often hilarious insight into the historical uses of what was once the most versatile industrial agent on earth. She also makes a passionate plea for us to give pee its place once again at the cutting edge of the green revolution. After an hour in the company of Sally Magnusson, the world will never look quite the same again.

With Christopher Brookmyre and Mark Billingham

Cairns Church, Milngavie - Saturday 10th Sept - 7.30pm

Doors open 7.15pm

Join us with what promises to be a stimulating, entertaining and very witty evening with one of crime writing’s most talented double acts.

To describe Christopher Brookmyre simply as a crime writer would be a crime in itself. This “raconteur, singer and comedian manqué” (Edinburgh Festival) has just published a new crime thriller – Where the Bodies are Buried – which confirms his status as one of the greatest writers in the crime genre: Quite Ugly One Morning was the winner of the Critics' First Blood Award for Best First Crime Novel of the Year in 1996, Bampot Central was shortlisted for the Crime Writers' Association Macallan Short Story Dagger in 1997, Boiling a Frog won the Sherlock Award for Best Comic Detective in 2000 and All Fun And Games until Someone Loses an Eye was the winner of the seventh Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction in 2006.

Thorne is back, and bigger than ever in Good as Dead: Mark’s Billingham’s first new novel since the hit TV drama Thorne, a television series based on DI Tom Thorne.

Mark Billingham has been awarded the 2003 Sherlock Award as the creator of the Best Detective created by a British writer and has twice won the Theakston's Old Peculier prize for best novel of the year. Mark Billingham was born and brought up in Birmingham. Having worked for some years as an actor and more recently as a TV writer and stand-up comedian his first crime novel was published in 2001. He lives in North London with his family

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