Book Fringe 2024 Program Launch

Please note that there is no book included in this ticket (our website just likes it this way). All ticket/voucher sales will be donated, if you cannot afford to buy a donation ticket today, please donate via the link here when you can. All acts/participants are donating their time for the cause. See more info at bottom of page.

The ALT Book Fringe is back for 2024 and we’re so excited to share the program with you that we decided to make a night of it!!

Run entirely out of, and by, three independent bookshops in Edinburgh: Lighthouse Bookshop, Argonaut Books and Typewronger Books, the ALT Book Fringe is a community book festival taking place 9th - 27th August. Events are spread across the three venues, from poetry and translation delights at Typewronger to fiction offerings at Argonauts and queer and radical writing at Lighthouse, with so much more in between.

On July 25th we invite you to join us at Leith Arches to celebrate the program launch with performances, chat and general GOOD times. The line-up of performances includes poetry with Katie Ailes and Nat Raha, music from Bashir Saade and a screening of the film ‘The Silent Protest: Jerusalem 1929’ (directed by Mahasen Nasser-Eldin) which tells the story of the Palestinian women’s uprising of that year, thanks to the folks at Falastin Film Fest.

All this will followed from 9.30pm by a DJ set courtesy of 3MR (Amr), so after all the announcements, readings and performance you can stick around til 10.30pm for more chat, music, drinks and dancing.

You can read about our performers below, with more tba!

And there’s more! This evening is also fundraiser for Fossil Free Books, a collective of authors, booksellers, illustrators, translators and other book workers organising for a book industry free from funding tied to fossil fuel extraction and the occupation and genocide in Palestine. All funds from ticket sales and money raised on the night will go to Fossil Free Books’ writer hardship fund and toward organising for a book industry free of fossil fuel and arms investments.

Our performers:

Meet 3MR (Amr), a versatile multidisciplinary artist, DJ, and co-curator of the Q’IWA collective. Renowned for sets that ignite and entrance the dance floor with a celebration of SWANA club culture, all while expertly blending ballroom, electronic and techno, 3MR infuses each performance with a vibrant blend of sound from the queer POC community.

Bashir Saade is a musician and researcher focusing on the Ney, the Middle Eastern reed flute. He has been performing across the world for the past 20 years, and has collaborated with numerous international musicians and projects. Although he’s been active in different musical scenes his main focus is Maqam music. Bashir studies and performs early 20th Arabic and Turkish (Ottoman) music styles kept through pre-1930s recordings and that have today largely disappeared. In the UK he is part of the Oxford Maqam ensemble that performs across the country and internationally. Bashir is also a Lecturer in Politics and Religion at the University of Stirling in Scotland.

Dr Nat Raha is a poet and activist-scholar, and Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at the Glasgow School of Art. Her books of poetry includes apparitions (nines) (Nightboat Books, forthcoming 2024), of sirens, body & faultlines (Boiler House Press, 2018), and countersonnets (Contraband Books, 2013). Recent creative and critical writing appears in Queer Print in Europe, Transgender Marxism, Third Text (‘Imagining Queer Europe then and now’) and Wasafiri. With Mijke van der Drift, Nat co-edits Radical Transfeminism zine, and is co-authoring Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds (Pluto Press, forthcoming 2024).

Katie Ailes is a poet, producer, educator, and researcher focusing on spoken word poetry. Since 2015 Katie has worked with I Am Loud CIC to coordinate hundreds of Loud Poets spoken word events, videos, podcasts, and other projects, and she currently serves as their Education and Access Director. In 2023 she was the Glastonbury Festival Poet in Residence. Katie’s PhD focused on the performance of authenticity in contemporary UK spoken word. Katie is also a classically trained dancer and choreographer interested in the intersection between speech and movement.

Shze-Hui Tjoa is a writer from Singapore who lives in Edinburgh. Her debut memoir, The Story Game (Tin House Books, 2024), is a genre-bending book about politics and storytelling, siblinghood, c-PTSD, having been a child musician, and deconstructing/finding the self. It was named one of the best books of summer by The Boston Globe, and has been featured in Electric Literature, The Rumpus, The Millions, Between the Covers podcast, and elsewhere. Shze-Hui also co-edits the online literary journal Sundog Lit, where she works to spotlight writers from different backgrounds and bring them into conversation.

More about ALT Book Fringe:

Our festival is an embodiment of our values. We believe in bookshops as empowering spaces for the marginalised in our communities, as well as hubs for thinking across borders, be they physical or cultural. We believe that literature is part of the material world, and the systems we belong to. As readers, writers and booksellers, we have the ability and power to change that world, in the way we do things as well as the literature we champion.

We believe in a thriving literary life that supports local talent in solidarity with global issues.

If you’d like to receive the program in your email inbox, you can sign up to the Lighthouse newsletter at the bottom of our homepage.

* this means that no vouchers issued as tickets for this event will be redeemable, instead funds will be passed on to Fossil Free Books to support writers and book workers campaigning for a Fossil Free book trade. Find out more about their work HERE