Scottish Books Events: October 2025

The Scottish International Storytelling Festival returns this month, themed around 'Lights of the North', exploring Scotland’s northern identity and the tales, songs and myths that bridge its culture with Finland, Iceland and beyond from 22 Oct-1 Nov. Highlights from the programme include Of Stars, Bears and the Beginning of Time, a mythic journey through the origin stories of the Fenno-Baltic tradition with storytelling by Riikka Palonen; Selkie: Past, Present and Future by storytellers and musicians Niall Moorjani and Ailsa Dixon; and Stories Drawn from the Land, an exhibition by Hester Aspland.

At The Portobello Bookshop, Malik Al Nasir comes to discuss his new book, Searching for My Slave Roots: From Guyana's Sugar Plantations to Cambridge on 1 October, Helena Fornells Nadal launches her new poetry pamphlet I Could Not Ask You To on 8 October and Chris Kraus launches her highly anticipated new book The Four Spent the Day Together on 17 October. Over at Lighthouse Bookshop, Dean Spade, Wu Tsang and Nat Raha team up to talk about Spade's Love in a F*cked Up World (1 Oct), Sara Ahmed launches No Is Not a Lonely Utterance (8 Oct), and Hal Shrieve hosts a queer vampire night (21 Oct). Ahmed will also be at Glasgow Women's Library on 9 October, and there's more Glasgow book launches at Mount Florida Books: Tom Byam Shaw launches his debut short story collection, You Are Going To Regret This (3 Oct); Thea Lenarduzzi launches The Tower with Daisy Lafarge (22 Oct); and Park Seolyeon and Anton Hur discuss Capitalists Must Starve (25 Oct). And at Good Press, Georgina Starr discusses her debut novel The Discreet Dash (14 Oct) while Kathia Huitrón launches her poetry collection This Too I Called Love (21 Oct).