Our Radical Book Fair speakers recommend!

The Edinburgh Radical Book Fair 2026 is in full swing! It’s running 5-8th November at the Assembly Roxy, with four days of panel discussions, performances, workshops and film screenings.

With a programme full of fantastic thinkers, authors and organisers visiting Edinburgh, we couldn’t let them leave without leaving a book recommendation that, for each of them, connects with the theme of this year’s fair: Building a Better Now!

Here are our speakers and chairs with their chosen books:

Abdelrahman ElGendy - From the Clinic to the Street by Lara Sheehi

Alison Phipps - The Poetics of Relation by Edouard Glissant

Carle Gent - Exposed: environmental politics and pleasure in posthuman times by Stacy Alaimo

China Mills - Practicing New Worlds by Andrea J Ritchie

Crysta Bennes - Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities by Rebecca Solnit

Daisy Hildyard - The Destruction of Palestine is the Destruction of the Earth by Andreas Malm

Devi Sridhar - Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams

Frances Cannon - Let’s Become Fungal! Mycelium Teachings and the Arts edited by Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez

Gill Higgins (Curlew) - A life on our Planet by David Attenburgh

Jen Ang - The Serviceberry: An economy of gifts and abundance by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Sally Hayden - 'Against a Tide of Evil: How One Man Became the Whistleblower to the First Mass Murder of the Twenty-First Century' by Mukesh Kapila

Sam Gonçalves - If We Burn by Vincent Bevins

Stuart Bretherton - Freedom is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis

Tahmina Begum - Believing women in Islam by Dr Asma Barlas, A Woman is No Man by Etaf Rum, Love In Colour by Bolu Babalola

Tanisha Spratt - How We Write Now: Living with Black Feminist Theory by Jennifer Nash

Tawona Sithole - Poetics of Relation by Edouard Glissant

William Keohane - Opening Night by Sara Baume