Popular Weekend Events in Edinburgh (August Updated)

The Edinburgh International Book Festival, founded in 1983, is held annually in August in Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland. As one of the world's most important book festivals, it attracts hundreds of authors each year to speak, sign books, and participate in discussions, covering a wide range of literary forms including fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, and children's literature.

Explore the creation and use of maps during the Second World War. Discover their use through personal stories, photography, and memorabilia. Between 1939 and 1945 over 3 billion maps were produced for the Allied, Soviet and German forces. Used to navigate the jungles of south-east Asia or for devising an escape plan, the maps on display are now mementoes. Maps kept alongside medals and photographs to say ‘I was there.' You'll find aerial photography, war diaries, and even a fashionable dress made from escape and evasion maps. The exhibition introduces us to a Prisoner of War, an RAF pilot, a Brigadier and an army chaplain through the maps they kept as a memory of their war service.

This room invites you to step inside the artist's studio: a place for creating, dreaming and thinking, where reality can be reimagined and transformed.Studios come in different shapes and sizes. From boat houses to seaside cottages and purpose-built environments, creative spaces are varied and unique. For many artists, their workspaces have also been dictated by circumstance, often marked by uncertainty and impermanence. The works on display give us a glimpse into the studio and the practical conditions of artmaking. They prompt us to consider how artists make work and how space can interact with and influence their materials and methods of making.

This exhibition will showcase nearly 80 portrait works by Catherine O'Pee, along with a selection of portraits from the National Collection of Scotland, prompting reflection on the subjects, motivations, and methods of portraiture. Viewers will have the opportunity to get up close to O'Pee's mentors and collaborators, the queer community, children, surfers, high school football players, and the political figures she portrays in her work, while also appreciating O'Pee's self-portraits. The exhibition will take viewers on a journey through the artist's 30-year career, exploring her interpretations of family, intimacy, and the home, as well as her reflections on politics, identity, and power structures. "Catherine O'Pee: Being Seen" will encompass the artist's first major work, "Being and Having" (1991), and her humanistic portraits of LGBTQ+ friends inspired by court painter Hans Holbein, culminating in her Baroque-style artist portraits. Opi's portrait works collectively construct a new narrative, challenging viewers to reflect on the most frequently depicted figures in artworks and those neglected groups.

Information Source: Community Engagement at Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh | eventbrite

Information Source: The Jazz Bar Edinburgh CIC | eventbrite

Information Source: St Giles' Cathedral | eventbrite

Information Source: The Cookbook Shop | eventbrite

Information Source: JCI Edinburgh | eventbrite

Information Source: Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop | eventbrite