Advertisement

Boston Book Festival Keynote Speakers Announced

Last year's Boston Book Festival. (Courtesy)
Last year's Boston Book Festival. (Courtesy)

The Boston Book Festival (BBF) has announced its lineup of keynote presenters for the 2015 festival, coming in the fall:

Margaret Atwood kicks off the festival on Friday, Oct. 23 (tickets available July 20). A poet, novelist, essayist and literary critic, Atwood was the first writer picked to write for the Future Library project. The project entails writing a manuscript that will be printed on paper from a forest that is currently growing in Oslo — which means we'll never get the chance to read it.

Young adult novelist Libba Bray will speak Saturday, Oct. 24. She's the New York Times-bestselling author of the "Gemma Doyle Triology," "The Diviners" and "Going Bovine."

Atul Gawande will be at the festival on Saturday too. A surgeon and public health researcher, he also shines on the pages of The New Yorker and in literary circles. His latest, "Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End," is "a masterwork that will inspire new, and markedly better, views of the end of life," according to ARTery book critic Carol Iaciofano.

Irish-American author Colum McCann is a professor of creative writing at Hunter College in New York. His latest, "Thirteen Ways of Looking," is his first collection of short fiction in more than a decade.

The now-triple-threat Amanda Palmer will be there Saturday night (get your tickets July 20). Known as a performer and musician, she released her first book last year, "The Art of Asking" to varied reactions. At the BFF though, her husband Neil Gaiman, whose claim to fame is "The Sandman" and "Coraline," will be the one asking her the questions.

Remember "Holes" or "Sideways Stories from Wayside School"? Newbury Medal-winning author Louis Sachar's latest is a cautionary tale about ecological disaster called "Fuzzy Mud."

Moshe Safdie will speak on Oct. 24. A world renowned architect, he has left his mark on Greater Boston with the Peabody Essex Museum, some Harvard buildings and The Esplanade luxury condo complex in Cambridge.

James Wood, a professor of literary criticism at Harvard and a book critic for the New Yorker, will give the humanities keynote.

The full schedule of the Boston Book Festival -- for which WBUR is a media sponsor -- will be announced in early fall. The fest runs Oct. 23 to 24 in Copley Square.

Editor's Note: This post has been updated with new information including the addition of James Wood and a change in the structure of Amanda Palmer's keynote. 

Headshot of Amy Gorel

Amy Gorel Senior Editor
Amy Gorel is a senior editor of digital news at WBUR.

More…

Advertisement

More from WBUR

Listen Live
Close