11 things you never knew about Glasgow's book festival Aye Write!

Here are 11 things you (probably) didn’t know about the Glasgow book festival....

1 The first Aye Write! Was in 2005 and it became an annual affair from 2007. It sold 15,000 tickets in its first year.

2 It is known for its committed - and honest - audiences. At the 2007 event, a member of the audience told author Iain Banks: “Your books are good, but they could be better.”

3 Long before he was British television’s wonder boy thanks to Line of Duty, Jed Mercurio appeared at Aye Write! to discuss his novel Ascent. He told our sister newspaper The Herald that if things had gone well and he had become a medical officer pilot in the RAF, he wouldn’t have turned to writing. “That would have been a disaster for British television drama,” said The Herald.

4 The 10th anniversary took place in 2015, with a special event called There’s Only One Aye Write which brought together many prize-winning authors who had appeared at the festival over its first decade, including Christopher Brookmyre, Denise Mina and Louise Welsh.

5 On discovering in 2015 that he had appeared at Aye Write! more than any other author, Chris Brookmyre said: “I was surprised to learn I’m the author who has appeared at most Aye Write! festivals. I was even more surprised to learn that they’re not completely sick of me, so I’ll be bringing down the tone with my presence yet again. I’m looking forward to revisiting old shames, recalling audience walk-outs and generally lowering the bar so that the fantastic line-up of my fellow Scottish authors can raise it again.”

6 A huge variety of famous faces have visited Aye Write! over the last 17 years – everyone from Eva Schloss, the stepsister of Anne Frank, Edith Bowman, Tracey Thorn and Karen Dunbar to Joan Bakewell, Alan Bennett, Kevin Bridges and Barbara Dickson. Once, there was even a Dalek.

7 There were fears Hollywood legend Kathleen Turner would not make the 2008 event, where she was scheduled to speak about her autobiography, after collapsing in rehearsals for a play in New York the week before. Thankfully, the star of Romancing the Stone and The War of the Roses recovered and made it to Glasgow to deliver a five-star performance.

8 Edwyn Collins, Scottish popstar and former frontman of Orange Juice, and his partner Grace Maxwell, held an audience spellbound when they appeared at the 2010 festival. The couple were there to talk about Falling and Laughing, Grace’s book chronicling Collins’ double brain haemorrhage in 2004.

9 Aye Write! was broadcast nationally for the first time in 2011, as part of the BBC’s World Book Night coverage. That year, the festival welcomed big names such as Dame Shirley Williams, Alexander McCall Smith and “Scandinavia’s king of crime”, Jo Nesbo.

10 At the 2015 event, author Tessa Dunlop was speaking about her book, which told the stories of women who served at top-secret code-breaking HQ Bletchley Park, when she discovered there were three Bletchley women, all in their 90s, in the audience. She invited them on stage – and the largely female audience gave them a standing ovation.

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11 The festival was set to host more than 260 writers, including its first reigning Booker Prize-winner, Bernardine Evaristo, in 2020, when it was cancelled due to Covid. In 2021, it went ahead online, and included an appearance by Booker Prize 2021 winner, Douglas Stuart, the Glasgow-born author of Shuggie Bain.

Aye Write runs over three weekends in May - from Friday, May 6 to Sunday, May 8; Thursday, May 12 to Sunday, May 15; and Thursday, May 19 to Sunday, May 22, 2022. The full programme and tickets are available online.