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Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy on the Pendle witches

Here are the first three tercets of a new poem which will be engraved on iron waymarkers, every five miles along the new Lancashire Witches Walk

The Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, has released a tempting come-on from her part in this year's 400th anniversary of remembrance for the eight Lancashire women and two men who were hanged in an outbreak of public hysteria over witchcraft which resonates in child-murder cases today.

As previously flagged in the Guardian Northerner, she is joining her fellow-poet Simon Armitage in a verse exploration of the tragedy in 1612 which saw political and legal manipulation of villagers living around Pendle Hill, where folklore about the supernatural has a long-standing hold.

The full poem requires you, quite rightly, to visit the new 51-mile Lancashire Witches Walk which threads from Pendle Hill - site of the alleged witchcraft - along public footpaths to Lancaster castle where the ten were condemned. But Duffy and the organisers offer this taster, the start of ten tercets, or three-line stanzas, which reflect the Laureate's views:

One voice for ten dragged this way once
by superstition, ignorance.
Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.
 
Witch: female, cunning, manless, old,
daughter of such, of evil faith;
in the murk of Pendle Hill, a crone.
  
Heavy storm-clouds here, ill-will brewed,
over fields, fells, farms, blighted woods.
On the wind's breath, curse of crow and rook.

Duffy says of the story:

I was struck by the echoes of under-privilege and hostility to the poor, the outsider, the desperate, which are audible still

Peter Flowers of Green Close Studios in Lancashire's Lune valley, which has been awarded £100,000 by the Arts Council to stage the anniversary events, says:

Walkers will be able to follow the story as well as the path, from its beginnings at Pendle to the tragic end.

The trail passes an area of moorland used for hangings and known as Golgotha, the only place in the UK to take the name of 'the place of the skull' where Jesus was crucified.

Such details, with their echoes of Christian churches' past role in persecuting witches – and today's controversy over the issue in Africa - are expected to form part of commemorations, including the total of 40 waymarkers on the new trail. Manchester-based textural artist Stephen Raw is creating ten mileposts to carry Duffy's poem; each will also feature the name of one of the 'witches' and a verse in specially designed letters so that a rubbing can be taken; if you do the whole walk, you can rub the entire poem.

Other events will involve thousands of local people in school visits, discussions and the making of a giant quilt which will embroider both the story and lessons learned from it.

One of the small towns involved is Padiham near Burnley, the scene of local council electoral victories in recent years by the British National Party. The commemorations will examine the role of politics in the Pendle case, which was used by the two judges to further their careers and by the government to crack down on opposition at a turbulent time.

The story has been passed down over the years in part because of a detailed record by the clerk of the court Thomas Potts, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, and partly because of the timeless issues of scapegoating, misogyny and cynical authority which illustrates. Potts' rendition of ludicrous evidence includes the testimony of nine-year-old Jennet Device which led to the execution of her entire family, but it did not save her from facing a charge of witchcraft herself, from a lying ten-year-old 20 years later.

Flowers and his wife Sue, who are both artists involved in bringing international colleagues to rural Lancashire, said that Duffy had been commissioned because of the scope for exploration of the story and the depth of the issues involved. Sue Flowers, whose interpretation of 17th century woodcuts of the affair is on display at Lancaster's Judges' Lodgings, says:

This is the culmination of a lot of previous work. We are trying to address social issues, the role of the outsider, how history can be very relevant today. Our schools programme is particularly looking at attitudes and outsiders, how easy it is to judge people.

Peter Flowers says:

Much of the work that Green Close is doing will be raising awareness of present issues around witchcraft and in particular helping people become more aware of, and helping to raise money for, the Lancaster based charity Stepping Stones Nigeria and their work with children accused of witchcraft.

The witches were arrested after a supposed conspiracy at a lonely ruin known as Malkin Tower, whose name was borrowed by Shakespeare for the witches' cat Greymalkin in Macbeth, written some six years before the trial. They were alleged to have planned an attack on Lancaster castle to free another group of supposed witches, as well as casting spells on neighbours and farm animals.
Malkin Tower's whereabouts are lost, but in December water company workers unearthed an ancient cottage close to a reservoir beneath Pendle Hill, complete with a mummified cat which had been bricked up in one of the walls. Simon Entwistle, a historian of the Pendle witches, said that the find was "like Tutankhamun's tomb" for enthusiasts:

It's an absolutely spellbinding discovery. Right in the heart of witching country.

Full details of the anniversary events are here.

Engraved outdoor poetry seems to be spreading in the north, not to everyone's satisfaction.

Carol Ann DuffySimon ArmitagePoetryPoet laureateLancashireWitches, wizards and magicWalking holidaysFestivalsFestivalsBNPTourism, transport and travelWomenWomen in politicsMartin Wainwright
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Edinburgh international book festival: day four bulletin

What to expect, which events still have tickets available and what's coming up on the site

There were some dramatic scenes at the Edinburgh international book festival on Monday, as Gordon Brown brought his extensive security entourage into Charlotte Square.

But even he was overshadowed by the late addition of professor Peter Higgs to the programme. Higgs took over from publisher Andrew Franklin as chair of an event featuring The Infinity Puzzle author Frank Close. The signing afterwards proved so popular, the festival bookshop ran out of copies and admirers were forced to grab anything they could find to get Higgs's signature.

Tuesday's lineup promises plenty of political delights. Roy Hattersley, human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith and former Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown all make appearances throughout the day. And there are some stellar novelists in attendance too: Wolf Hall author Hilary Mantel will be discussing her sequel, Bring up the Bodies with James Runcie, Man Booker nominee Ned Beauman will talk about his second book, The Teleportation Accident, alongside Nick Harkaway. And Sven Lindqvist, one of Sweden's most illustrious authors, will talk about the first English translation of his book The Myth of Wu Tao-zu.

Mantel and Ashdown are already sold out, but there are tickets available for:

12.00: Charles Allen

14.00: James Gleick

15.00: Clive Stafford-Smith

15.00: Kerry Hudson & Lisa O'Donnell

15.30: Alexander McCall Smith (children's event)

16.00: Nick Coleman

16.30: Val McDermid & Sue Black

17.00: Sven Lindqvist

20.30: Alice Oswald

You can also still get tickets to today's Guardian Debate, in which Ferdinand Mount and Jules Goddard discuss if there are any alternatives to market forces.

Tuesday's signing tent features:

Look out for our day three Edinburgh podcast, which features authors Nell Freudenberger, Michael Sandel, Jess Richards and Icelandic writer Sjon, and a new instalment of What I'm Thinking About from former Today Show presenter and book festival guest selector Sue MacGregor.

And if you're around Charlotte Square over the next two weeks, be sure to check out Between the Lines, an exhibition of author portraits taken by photographer Chris Close throughout the festival.

Got any highlights of the Edinburgh international book festival you'd like to share? Tell us what's got you talking and the events you'd like to hear more about.

Edinburgh International Book FestivalEdinburgh festivalFestivalsVal McDermid
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Sue MacGregor: What I'm thinking about ... the downside of digital

'Now that almost anyone can get on air from anywhere, it's hard to imagine the excitement of getting through live to someone important sitting in a radio studio in, say, the old Soviet Union'

Books - with real covers and paper pages - are here at the Edinburgh International Book festival in great and healthy profusion, with almost 800 authors and illustrators gathered to promote their wares. But, as a guest selector at the festival curating a series with the broad theme of dealing with the information age, I'm reminded of how digital technology has affected every aspect of life.

When I started on Radio 4's Today programme in the 1980s (we still typed the scripts on ancient typewriters - with a carbon copy for the producer), getting hold of anyone abroad, be they correspondent or foreign politician, in what was called "quality" mode, involved a series of complicated international telephone connections - with no guarantee that the end result would be audible. Or even that the contributor would be there at all, and not have popped out of the studio for a cup of tea, fed up with waiting.

Now, though, satellite phone connections are generally so crystal clear that "abroad" doesn't sound exotic any more. Correspondents from Delhi to Djibouti, from Afghanistan to Antartica, might as well be sitting in the studio in London (and perhaps sometimes wish they were). Even bog-standard mobile phone connections can be in pretty impressive quality. On Any Questions on a Friday night, you might hear a politician airing his or her views from a parked car near a motorway if they've misjudged the traffic jams. Before mobiles they never made it on air.

Indeed, since almost anyone can get on air from anywhere these days, it's probably hard to imagine the sheer excitement of getting through live to someone important sitting in a radio studio in, say, the old Soviet Union. In 1986, two weeks after the Chernobyl explosion, I had a phone-in date with Georgi Arbatov, one of Gorbachev's advisers. He'd agreed to take part, but after the nuclear disaster would he be there? And would the technology work? The minutes ticked by to live air time (we had 45 minutes to fill) and still no sign of Georgi. Then suddenly through my headphones I heard the unmistakable sound of Russian tea being stirred in a glass. With seconds to spare, we were on. And it was an historic moment - a representative of the old Soviet regime opening up to live callers with no advance notice of the questions.

There were advantages to the old technology, too - especially during hurricanes. When the hurricane of 1987 hit London hard, there was a total power cut in Broadcasting House. But computers had not yet replaced typewriters, so having fled to the sports department - the only one with its own generator - we could still bash out the scripts in the early hours in the old-fashioned way, and the office phones still worked. Today's digital landline phones go dead when the power's cut. Memo to all - keep at least one old-fashioned plug-in phone at home.

Because there are no pictures on radio it's harder to imagine what further developments there can be. Last year the Today programme ran an April Fool's joke about 3D radio - and the engineers took up the challenge. It seems the BBC really is now working on 3-D radio with surround-sound, initially aimed at the Proms audience. The Archers in 3-D perhaps? Sounds intriguing.

Sue MacGregor' series, "A Survival Kit for the Information Age", continues today with AL Kennedy on The Pressure to Write and novelists Tessa Hadley and Sarah Hall discussing Short (and not so sweet) stories

Edinburgh International Book Festival
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Edinburgh International Book festival: day three bulletin

The rain may have returned to Charlotte Square but the atmosphere at the Edinburgh International Book festival is still sunny after a lively weekend.

Yesterday, Alasdair Gray treated festival-goers to a reading of a few short stories. Sometime extremist Maajid Nawaz told a packed crowd that "you can't impose democracy from the barrel of a gun" (listen to him on our day two podcast) and Tottenham MP David Lammy talked about the state of the UK after last summer's riots.

Today's star attraction is Michael Palin – long since sold out, alas – who's making his first Edinburgh book festival appearance for 25 years. Former prime minister Gordon Brown will also speak publicly for the first time on the issue of Scottish independence at the Donald Dewar Lecture at 4.30pm. Frank Close, professor of theoretical physics, will be appearing as well to talk about the Higgs Boson, in a talk chaired by Professor Peter Higgs himself. And Chris Riddell and Neil Gaiman will talk about the 10th anniversary of Gaiman's novel Coraline this evening.

Tickets are still available for the following events:

13.30: Michael Sandel

14.00: Andrew Feinstein

15.00: Neill Freudenberger & Krys Lee

15.00: Victorian Edinburgh with Frances Jarvie & Gordon Jarvie

19.00: Christopher Fleet and Magnus Linklater

20.30: Geoff Dyer

20.30: Zoe Strachan & Benjamin Wood

And if you're popping into the signing tent, here's today's schedule:

The first night of Unbound got off to a fine start yesteryda, despite stiff competition from the Olympics closing ceremony, and tonight's event comes courtesy of acclaimed Glasgow literary night Words Per Minute, with a line-up that includes acclaimed authors Jenni Fagan and Alan Bissett.

And don't forget about the Guardian Book Swap: leave your books on the bookshelf in the Guardian Spiegeltent or at our other book swap locations, such as the Spiegeltent on George Street, the Udderbelly in Bristo Square and various phone boxes around the city. Remember to tweet us a photo of you leaving your book for someone else to enjoy!

Edinburgh International Book Festival
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Madeleine Thien: What I'm thinking about ... Cambodia's genocide

'If a person erases him or herself in order to survive, how can they find that self again?'

When the Khmer Rouge were pushed to the edges of Cambodia in 1979, the advancing Vietnamese army entered a capital city that appeared to be empty. Phnom Penh, which four years earlier had been home to two million people, was chillingly silent. The journalist Elizabeth Becker, one of only two foreign journalists allowed into the country under the Khmer Rouge regime, described it as a city "that had been left to rot," a place of "eerie silence and empty streets."

"There were," she writes, "no details in this new Cambodia."

I first heard parts of the Khmer Rouge story when I was child. In the early 1980s, half a million Cambodians sought refuge outside their country. I was seven or eight at the time, and knew Cambodia only as the country a stone's throw away from Malaysia, my father's homeland. A great number of these refugees were children. They came without brothers, sisters or parents and were named "separated children." On television, they were withdrawn and quiet; for me, watching them arrive was like being shaken awake.

In April 1975, on the day of their victory, the Khmer Rouge began a revolution that was to be Cambodia's Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution combined; by turning Cambodia's back on the world - from the foreign invasions, occupations and collaborations that had shattered their homeland - they said they would lift their country to a better future. The Khmer Rouge demanded an existence that combined a Buddhist renunciation of desire with the Communist dictum that only violent revolution could cleanse a people. Work and obedience became paramount but, even then, the most dutiful workers were not safe. It was preferable, the Khmer Rouge held, to kill 10 innocent citizens than to let a single enemy live.

Victims were forced to write autobiographies that, version by tortured version, confessed to crimes they had never committed. It was safer to have no history at all - so Cambodians enacted a silent disappearance, relying on emptiness of expression and disavowal of feeling in order barricade their selves, their memories, their passions and heartaches from the world. They disappeared in the hope of one day resurfacing.

In my 30s, I began spending time in Cambodia. I found, as the months and years passed, that I could not let the country go, and I began, despite many doubts, to write about the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge years. There are, I believe, eternal and harrowing questions that the Cambodian genocide poses, and which we have never confronted. The Khmer Rouge emptied the cities, people changed their names, let go of their identities and effaced their selves; the world forgot a small country that had suffered immeasurably from the interference and the wars of larger powers.

I am almost 40 now, the novel is finished, but my questions remain. If a person erases him or herself in order to survive, how can they find that self again? Can survival bring them peace, or is it only madness to remember?

One evening, I visited a friend who had lived through the genocide. He is an older man, in his mid-70s, and someone I have long admired. We met a year ago, when my novel was first published. On this night, he told me that I had written something that was a near-impossibility in Pol Pot's Cambodia: I had allowed my character to escape in 1976, two-and-a-half years before the regime fell. I told my friend that during the writing of this novel, I often thought that I was writing a story of a girl who had not survived. I was writing an existence that might have been, had such an escape been possible.

We talked about Elizabeth Becker, about the city eradicated of details, about the stories that never surfaced. We talked about the meaning of escape and the complexity of survival.

"I think it was your character's destiny," he said finally. "It was her destiny to live her life."

Madeleine Thien discussed south-east Asian concerns with Tony Davidson at the Edinburgh International Book Festival yesterday

Edinburgh International Book FestivalCambodiaFiction
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Not the Booker prize 2012: the shortlist

Out of the swamp of technical problems, seven novels have emerged triumphant on our Not the Booker shortlist. Now it's time to read and evaluate each in turn…

The Lord of Chaos laughs. The trees shake and drop ripe fruit on our heads. Birds scream and swoop. We shield our eyes, but they peck at the fingers. There are, we are told, technical problems. The Lord of Chaos laughs again. Snakes writhe beneath us, twist around our ankles. There are yet more insects. They thicken the air, crawl up our legs, infest our undergarments. We are told that there are other people, far away voting on Facebook, and they must be counted. We count them. Then learn they have also posted on the site. And we trudge on, exhausted, through the shadows. But some have been left behind, we learn. They need more time. More time among the briars and thorns and oozing swamps.

Something sticks in our side. A spear? A thorn? Another complaint from a Ewan Morrison supporter? The Lord Of Chaos roars. The sound is deep in the dark. There is a crash. Something has broken. There is howling. That's me. We move into the final day – a few hours after the final day was already supposed to have finished. The monkeys screech. We fall. We start to run. Into the trees ...

... Suddenly, we stop. There is light ahead. We are in a clearing. We have our shortlist!

Pig Iron by Ben Myers – with 62 votes
Paint The Town Red by AJ Kirby – with 50 votes
The Notable Brain Of Maximilian Ponder by JW Ironmonger – with 49 votes
Life! Death! Prizes! by Stephen May – with 47 votes
Tales From The Mall by Ewan Morrison – with 46 votes
The Revelations by Alex Preston – with 46 votes
The Casablanca Case by Simon Swift – with 35 votes

The observant will notice that this shortlist is slightly longer than convention dictates. Swift was nudged out of contention by the extra day that we had to add following on from all those computer problems. That seemed too much like hard luck. So he's on the list too.

And so, we are out of the woods, for a while. Our work for the next few weeks is clear. We must read, discuss and evaluate each book in turn. We'll go through them in alphabetical order, by author, meaning the delightfully named JW Irongmonger's The Notable Brain of Maximilian Ponder is up first.

This book, according to GeoffBlamire, "is not to be missed... It moves effortlessly between the life of a child in Kenya in the 1960s, a potted history of the Ponder family and glimpses into the mind of Max though snippets from 'The Catalogue'. The story is littered with a multitude of varied facts over a wide range of subjects. Some that I remember are about philosophies, Ugandan atrocities and astronomy, but there are many more. They are told in a manner that makes them interesting to read and gives you a willingness to try and remember them. At the end of every chapter you wonder what is coming next and are greedy for the next chapter."

Good news. While we have breathing space, it's also worth looking at the other six contenders.

AJ Kirby's Paint This Town Red is, says Marilyn Baron, "Jurassic Park meets Jaws... a descent into darkness and devilry. Limm Island is cut off from the rest of the world, delivering its 'own version of justice.' The multi-talented Kirby has created an outrageous cast of connected characters peppered with comic foibles. When a prehistoric panther, a winged beast and a Biblical invasion of flies 'pick off the townspeople as prey,' the curse that plagues the town threatens to destroy it. Oh, and there's also a great, white beached shark that makes Jaws seem like a minnow."

It sounds like a metaphor for this very prize.

Olwen Acts says Stephen May's Life! Death! Prizes! has "Way too much story for a conventional Booker novel. It's a warm-hearted coming of age story, but it's also much else. Things move and they move fast. Billy Smith is hormonal, skint, confused and obsessed with a computer game. He is, despie this, very appealing in the way that teenage boys are. He's also meant to be the guardian of his little brother Oscar. It's a truly hair-raising roller coaster ride that leaves you feeling somehow empty when you finish."

That too sounds like a description of the Not the Booker.

Fortunately, Ewan Morrison's Tales from the Mall doesn't. Instead it could, claims robotmaster, be "the first novel for the Culture of Metrics. Its combination of behavioural dioramas, historical investigation, economic analysis and imaginative extrapolation has invented a new form for itself, one well suited to portraying the retail driven, service oriented society that has grown under our feet in the without us quite realising it. Each chapter is a separate unit, reflecting the modularity of the mall itself, but it all adds up to a thoughtful examination of the denationalised space we all now inhabit."

I admit I had to google "culture of metrics", but when I did, I began to realise how interesting this book might be.

Ben Myers' Pig Iron reminded Connemara84 of "Shane Meadows' Dead Man's Shoes, the tales of Bartley Gorman and the backwater prose of Willy Vlautin, Daniel Woodrell or Richard Ford." It is, s/he wrote: " a genuinely moving story, written in North East dialect... one of the gems from my bookpile this year. Encompassing themes such as poverty, crime, racism, love, masculinity, nature and violence, it gives the reader a redemptive character that restores faith in humanity. A cinematic classic in the making."

I looked up Willy Vlautin too. He sounds wonderful.

The poetically named alabasterheart calls Alex Preston's The Revelations: "A blistering attack on the fishy religions that prey on the young and vulnerable, who don't care about the depth of your faith but the depth of your pockets. This is a beautifully written, very thoughtful book that avoids the kind of easy, obvious statements and instead makes you think long and hard about how and why our society is as shallow and frivolous as it is."

I'm sold already.

And finally, The Casablanca Case. Melanie Dent explains that: "reading a Simon Swift novel is like having mind-blowing awesome sex with the love of your life. From the slow seduction where Errol Black arrives in Casablanca to investigate the murder of his former friend, Hermeez Wentz; through to initial resistance from local law enforcement determined to perpetrate the myth that Wentz's death is the result of a robbery gone wrong. The tension and titillation builds as Black finds himself at the centre of a conspiracy with shady local crime bosses and seductive women; suddenly no longer sure who he can trust. Then the totally explosive climax where Errol finds out the truth about who is on whose side; friends who are not friends and people he should have run a mile from are actually trying to protect him."

Consider my mind boggled. I shrivel at the thought of trying to top that review. Fortunately, however, I have six weeks to plan it, all being well... all being well...

I'll see you in just over a week with some thoughts about Maxmilian Ponder.

Awards and prizesFictionSam Jordison
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Edinburgh festival book swap: how to get involved

At the Edinburgh Book festival this year? Join in with our book swap: pass on books you love, and pick up others' favourites

Got a book you really want to share with others? This year, we're hosting our very own book swap at the Edinburgh International Book festival, in Charlotte Square Gardens and all around the city.

The main book swap shelf is located just inside the Guardian Spiegeltent, where your books can be left and picked up by other people passing through the festival. Each book should contain a recommendation from the previous owner and can be swapped over and over again by each new reader.

Want to get involved? This is how it works:

- Bring a book with you - something you love and that you think other people really should read - when you visit the festival

- Fill out one of the sticker inserts (available at the book swap shelf) explaining why you've chosen the book, and give it a star rating. Leave your Twitter name, too, so that whoever picks up your book can tell you what they swapped it for

- Don't forget to put the little corner sticker on the outside of the book so that people know it's a book-swap copy

- Once you've finished with your new book, bring it back and do it all over again

Tweet us at @GuardianBooks to tell us what you've swapped, and use the hashtags #edbookswap and #edbookfest so that we can see how the swap is progressing. Or even better, tweet us a picture of the book you've left and what you've swapped it with.

Edinburgh International Book Festival
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Chris Riddell: What I'm thinking about ... a new era for illustration

'In the digital future, texts will be annotated visually, animated and illustrated like never before'

For my birthday this year I was given a 1947 edition of Samuel Pepys' diaries. This was post-war austerity Britain and materials were scarce, so the book is printed on thin "prayer book" paper and has an austere, two-colour paperback binding. But the book also contains dozens of exquisite black and white illustrations by EH Shepard, one of the greatest illustrators of the age.

Today Shepard is known chiefly for his illustrations to AA Milne's Winnie the Pooh books and for his wonderful characterisations of Mole, Ratty and Mr Toad in The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame's classic children's book. But, as his beautiful pictures of Pepys and his peers show, Shepard was more than a children's book illustrator.

He was a consummate draughtsman with a loose, flowing line and a gift for composition. He was a brilliant political cartoonist, working for Punch on a weekly basis from 1921 to 1953 (my favourite political cartoon of his depicts a Nazi goose, in an iron helmet and uniform, solemnly 'goosestepping' into the Rhineland - funny and chilling in equal measure). And he wrote and illustrated a memoir, Drawn From Memory, that is a haunting evocation of an Edwardian childhood and one of the finest autobiographies by an artist ever written. What I love about Shepard's work is that it doesn't respect boundaries. While remaining consistent in style, Shepard's skill at drawing allowed him to illustrate non-fiction, poetry, satire and autobiography with equal authority.

But times changed and, in the latter half of the 20th century, illustration went into decline. Children's books that in Shepard's day would have been automatically illustrated were deemed no longer to require an illustrator's input. A case in point are the defiantly un-illustrated Harry Potter books. In newspapers and periodicals, Photoshop and montage replaced illustrators and cartoonists. No mainstream publisher these days would dream of commissioning illustrations to a new edition of Pepys' diaries. In fact, by the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century, illustration had vanished from adult literature more or less entirely. The new Martin Amis novel, Lionel ASBO, may warrant a stunning cover by the illustrator David Hughes, but God forbid any of his brilliantly acerbic drawings should grace the text.

Yet as the digital revolution gathers momentum, traditional print publishing is being forced to change. In this new age of austerity, as chill winds blow through publishers' offices, we need illustrators of the calibre of EH Shepard more than ever. And they're out there - look at Posy Simmonds' wickedly perceptive novel Tamara Drewe, David Roberts' brilliantly quirky illustrations to Mick Jackson's Bears of England and Shaun Tan's surreal and exquisite wordless story The Arrival. Like Shepard, these illustrators' work reaches all ages.

As the Kindle's dread grip on digital publishing is challenged by tablet computers and android smartphones, with their bright screens and high resolution, the need for illustration is growing. Newspapers such as the Guardian and the Observer, meanwhile, are expanding into the internet's broad open spaces - spaces with plenty of room for illustration.

At the same time graphic novels, computer games and CGI animation are blurring the old distinctions and categories in publishing. In the digital future, texts will be annotated visually, animated and illustrated like never before. The austere 'prayer book' paper that permitted the space for Shepard's illustrations to Pepys' diaries is now being recreated in the digital era.

It is a space waiting to be filled by today's illustrators.

Chris Riddell is Illustrator in Residence at the Edinburgh International Book festival. He and collaborator Paul Stewart introduce their new books Muddle Earth Too and Wyrmeweald: Bloodhoney tomorrow (August 13) at 10.30am, and at 8pm tomorrow, he talks to Neil Gaiman about his illustrations for a 10th anniversary edition of Gaiman's Coraline

Edinburgh International Book FestivalPicture booksChris Riddell
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Edinburgh International Book festival: day one bulletin

What's going on, which tickets are still available and what to expect on the site

Good morning all and welcome to the first day of the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

Unusually for August, the weather is glorious and we've been welcomed into Charlotte Square by an energetic samba band:

Huge queues formed at the gate this morning for Gruffalo author Julia Donaldson's event, the first in the RBS Children's Programme. She and Jacqueline Wilson – who'll be launching her new book, Four Children and It, based on E. Nesbit's original - are among this morning's most popular events.

Other big names appearing today are perennial Edinburgh favourite and native of the city Alexander McCall Smith and veteran actor Simon Callow, who'll be talking about Charles Dickens.

All of these events are sold out but there are still tickets available for most shows today, including:

15.00: Andrew Motion

16.30: Meg Rosoff

17.00: Charles Fernyhough & Ben Marcus

19;00: David M Wilson

20.00: Tom Watson

20.30: Ewan Morrison

The lovely weather means the crowds will probably pour in throughout the day, so check the site for updates as events sell out.

If you've missed out on tickets for your favourite authors, you might still be able to catch them in the signing tent. Here's today's schedule:

We'll be uploading content throughout the day too, so look out for our new series What I'm Thinking About, in which festival authors tell us what's on their mind at the moment – today's instalment comes from Scottish author Ewan Morrison, who's talking about his book Tales from the Mall.

Our first podcast will come from Andrew Motion and Frank Cottrell Boyce, and we'll also have a report on Jacqueline Wilson's talk.

We'll be here at the festival for the duration so do get in touch with your book festival tales and let us know your highlights.

Edinburgh International Book Festival
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Ewan Morrison: what I'm thinking about ... why capitalism wants us to stay single

'Now that the market is cashing in on the buying power of single people, the radical choice is to get married'

We like to think we're free in the free market; that we're beyond the forces of advertising and social manipulation by market forces. But there is a new social trend - the rise of 'the single person' as model consumer - that presents us with a paradox. What we one though of as radical - staying single - may now be reactionary.

The long-term relationship, like the job-for-life, is fast being deregulated into short term, temporary arrangements with no promise of commitment, as sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has been warning us for over a decade. It's hard for two people to be self-employed, with no promise of a stable future, together. Capitalism now wants us to be single.

Being single, has since the 60s been seen as a radical choice, a form of rebellion against bourgeois capitalist conformism. As sociologist Jean-Claude Kaufmann says, the shift away from family life to solo lifestyles in the 20th century was part of the "irresistible momentum of individualism". But this "freedom" looks a lot less glamorous when viewed through the perspective of planned changes in consumerism.

It now makes economic sense to convince the populace to live alone. Singles consume 38% more produce, 42% more packaging, 55% more electricity and 61% more gas per capita than four-person households, according to a study by Jianguo Liu of Michigan State University. In the US, never-married single people in the 25-to-34 age bracket, now outnumber married people by 46%, according to the Population Reference Bureau. And divorce is a growth market: one broken family means that two households have to buy two cars, two washing machines, two TVs. The days of the nuclear family as ideal consumption unit are over.

As capitalism sinks into stagnation, corporations have realised that there are two new growth strands – firstly, in the emerging singles market and secondly in encouraging divorce and the concept of individual freedom. This can be seen in changes in advertising, with products as diverse as burgers and holidays being targeted towards singles - in particular single women. New ads for Honda and Citibank expound solitary self-discovery and relationship postponement over coupledom.

As Catherine Jarvie says, "top-pocket relationships" where "neither party is looking for long-term commitment" are the new way - witness the meteoric rise of dating website Match.com. In the US, Craiglist ads expose the subconscious connection between disposable consumerism and self-selling: one reads 'Buy my IKEA sofa and fuck me on it first, $100'.

This equating of self with product has come about precisely because the cycles of planned and perceived obsolescence in product consumption are no longer delivering capitalist growth. In a period of market saturation, when we have already consumed all we can, we are encouraged to objectify ourselves as items 'on the market', consuming others. Exercises in the disposability of humans.

Consumerism now wants you to be single, so it sells this as sexy. The irony is that it's now more radical to attempt to be in a long-term relationship and a long-term job, to plan for the future, maybe even to attempt to have children, than it is to be single. Coupledom, and long-term connections with others in a community, now seem the only radical alternative to the forces that will reduce us to isolated, alienated nomads, seeking ever more temporary 'quick fix' connections with bodies who carry within them their own built-in perceived obsolescence.

The solution: Get radical, get hitched, demand commitment from partners and employers. Say no to the seductions of the disposable singles market.

Ewan Morrison talks about his book, Tales from the Mall, today (11 August) and discusses the digital revolution with Andrew Keen tomorrow

Edinburgh International Book FestivalEwan Morrison
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