Photographs by Emily Macinnes for Braemar Festival at the Fife Arms and Jan Rutherford on the tour.

Alexander headed north to the Highlands last week for the Braemar Literary Festival at the Fife Arms Hotel and surrounding area. Alexander was delighted to take part in this, a Queen’s Reading Room partnership festival which was established in 2022 and attracts readers and speakers from across the UK.

The aim of the festival is to ‘honour the literary heritage of Scotland and the Cairngorms as the inspiration for generations of writers, poets and creative thinkers’. And it does this very well indeed.

The beautiful Fife Arms Hotel sits in the centre of Braemar and it is a sumptuous sight to behold. A grand, traditional hotel from the outside, an artworld opens up as you walk through the doors. It is a feast for the eyes and indeed all the senses.

Alexander’s event – in conversation with the delightful Vicki Perrin , CEO of the Queen’s Reading Room – filled the auditorium with belly-laughs and warmth and he was delighted to meet up with booksellers from Scotland’s oldest independent bookshop, Yeadon’s.

From Braemar to London for a signing of In the Time of Five Pumpkins for Goldsboro Books, literary dinner at the Savile Club and then our annual event at Daunt on Marylebone High Street.

This was genuinely a week of great cheer and a rare opportunity to meet readers from right across the UK and beyond.

(We had a blast!)