Phil Beadle is the dynamic, enigmatic ex-rock musician who has single-handedly started a riot in the classroom - in the good way. The winner of Secondary Teacher of the Year in 2005, Phil is also the English teacher who transformed so called 'unteachable' children on the Channel Four television series. He has a gift for instilling children, teachers and parents with a fresh, new working ethic.

His new book Could Do Better! is a hands on guide to help parents unlock their child's unique intelligence and ensure that they have the best possible chance of succeeding at school. Phil will talk about his life and work and why we should have faith in education.

Sponsored by the RSA - The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts,

Manufactures and Commerce.
Supported by Transworld.

Bringing the festive to the festival, we launch with readings from Tindal Street Press authors Catherine O'Flynn, Paul McDonald and Michael Richardson and our second annual Book Festival Quiz.

The Book Festival Quiz is a light-hearted chance to test your knowledge of the writing and reading world. Bring a team or join one on the night. The whole evening will be a friendly introduction to the delights that lie ahead in this year's Festival!

Presented in association with Tindal Street Press.

We use the post-industrial environment of Ikon Eastside to host an evening of text based experimental music and performance in collaboration with Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theatre (BEAST) and the University of Birmingham. Featuring works by John Cage and others and curated by composer Scott Wilson, this event pushes language to its limits and pays homage to silence.

Rosie Whitehouse and Vesna Goldsworthy.
Rosie Whitehouse had a successful career at the BBC World Service until she became a mother. She then spent five years as a housewife in the war-torn Balkans, married to Tim Judah, a correspondent for The Economist. Are We There Yet?: Travels With My Frontline Family, is her account of those years and the parenting dilemmas she faced - like how to explain to your son that the noise he can hear is in fact the first shots of war.

Vesna Goldsworthy left Yugoslavia in 1986. Chernobyl Strawberries is her revealing personal account of growing up with Yugoslav Socialism. Vesna is senior lecturer at Kingston University's Centre for Suburban Studies, which she founded in 2003. Vesna and Rosie will talk about the extraordinary times they have lived through and the writing it inspired.

Jackie Kay is one of our best loved writers, a gifted poet and novelist who has also written for children, a deeply thoughtful user of language and a wonderful performer of her work. With humour and sensuality her writing deftly explores issues of gender, sexuality, identity, racism and cultural differences.

Jackie comes to the Festival to read from her new poetry collection, Darling (which includes favourite poems from her previous books along with new poems) and to talk about her life and writing.

Suzi Quatro grew up in the USA, experiencing the rock n' roll revolution as it happened. She joined the band The Pleasure Seekers whilst still in her teens and never looked back. She later became a successful solo singer, bassist and songwriter with a string of hits throughout the 70s and 80s including Can The Can and Devil Gate Drive. She has had 16 hit singles, sold over 45 million records and toured since 1964. Her autobiography, Unzipped, is packed with celebrity anecdotes and is a frank account of a remarkable life in the music business.

Charlie Jordan presents the late show on Heart FM.
Supported by Hodder & Stoughton

The legend of Bluebeard is rewritten here by his many 'wives' - 21 women from the Midlands. The poems emerged after Julie Boden, poet in residence at Symphony Hall, Birmingham, invited the women for a tour of the building followed by a performance of Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle. Drawing on theatre and music, these poems offer another look at the familiar myth. They have been edited into the collection Bluebeard's Wives by Julie Boden and Zoë Brigley, who is a Postgraduate Fellow at the University of Warwick.

The performance also features Roz Goddard, Helen Yendall, Christine Coleman and Jo Bell amonst others.

Co-ordinated by Apples & Snakes in association with Heaventree Press

Xinran in Conversation with Rob Gifford.

Xinran was a successful journalist and radio presenter in Beijing until 1997 when she moved to London to write novels, including Miss Chopsticks and The Good Women of China.Her work presents a fascinating insight into one of the most significant nations on earth. She has also published a book of her columns from The Guardian entitled What The Chinese Don't Eat.

Rob Gifford is the author of China Road, an account of a journey along Route 312, which flows 3000 miles from east to west, during which he witnessed at close hand the social and economic revolution that is transforming China. Rob first went to China as a young language student, and has spent much of the last twenty years studying and reporting on the country. From 1999 to 2005, he was Beijing correspondent of the USA's National Public Radio (NPR) and is now the NPR's London bureau chief.

Supported by Random House

Double Tickets for both Chinese Literature Events: £10 (£8)

Diane Wei Liang's first novel was The Eye Of Jade. She was born in China in 1966, the year the Cultural Revolution began. She was studying at Beijing University in the 1980s and was forced to leave China and continue her studies in the USA following her involvement in the students' revolt that led to the Tiananmen Square massacre.

She will be in conversation with Rob Gifford about the changing face of contemporary China.

Supported by Bloomsbury & Pan Macmillan

Double Tickets for both Chinese Literature Events: £10 (£8)

This will be the first public performance by Birmingham's new Poet Laureate. Come and hear the newly appointed Laureate read their work and talk about their plans for the year ahead.

Featuring writers who were born here, moved here, seeking asylum here or just passing through, Writers Without Borders presents poetry in languages spoken from Africa to the Caribbean via Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Crossroad Collision is the stunning fusion band featuring Steve Yimga and poet Sue Brown. Fusion, confusion, and above all celebration.

Presented in association with Birmingham Libraries

In the same vein of his bestselling A Mad World, My Masters, John Simpson offers a lively and upbeat look at the challenges and the changes the world has gone through in his long career as foreign correspondent and now BBC World Affairs Editor in his new book Not Quite World's End.

He looks at the world's troubles - the Middle East, global warming, population growth - and takes the perhaps surprising view that it's not the end of the world. With vivid prose and wonderful anecdotes about the many strange people and places he has come across, it adds up to a richly satisfying read. He brings to the Festival his long experience and his remarkable ability to explain what's really going on out there and offers us a crumb of comfort in desperate times.

Sponsored by Eversheds
Supported by Pan Macmillan

Veteran politician Tony Benn returns to the Festival to discuss his Diaries 2001-2007. When Tony Benn left parliament after 51 years he said he'd have 'more time for politics' - and so it was. He has helped reinvigorate national debate through public meeting, mass campaigns and appearances in the media, passionately bringing moral and political issues to wide audiences. Throughout, he has kept his diaries.

Supported by Pan Macmillan

A live mix of performance poetry, theatre, photography and documentary film footage, this is a lively, entertaining and thought provoking record of two poets' travels in Texas and the southern states of America in spring 2005. It features poems especially written in reaction to their experiences in the US; from thoughts on people they met and places they saw, to commentary on events and slams they performed at and the differences between US and English style slam poetry.
The show also features a special guest American poet.

Louis MacNeice was born in Belfast in 1907, the son of a Church of Ireland clergyman who later became a bishop. Educated in England, he lectured in Classics in Birmingham and London. In 1941 he joined the BBC Features Department and was responsible for many classic productions, including his own radio play The Dark Tower (with music by Benjamin Britten).

This seminar will be an opportunity to discuss the life and work of one of our most influential poets, on the hundredth anniversary of his birth. As well as a short presentation on the poet, we will look closely at some of his short poems.

A 40th anniversary celebration of the revolutionary Penguin Modern Poets No.10: The Mersey Sound. With its publication in 1967, the late Adrian Henri and team turned verse on its head and filled college and theatre gigs to capacity up and down the country. Since then, one million copies have been sold, making it the country's best-selling anthology of verse. Here, Roger and Brian each read their Top Twenty most requested poems.

Poetry Please presenter Roger McGough, is one of Britain's favourite poetry voices. His latest volume is Selected Poems and his autobiography, Said And Done, includes encounters with Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Marlon Brando and Salman Rushdie. Brian Patten is one of Europe's foremost poets and has read alongside Pablo Neruda, Allen Ginsberg, Stevie Smith and Robert Lowell. His latest collections for adults are The Collected Love Poems and Selected Poems.

Presented by the Southbank Centre on Tour.

Fire and Steam tells the dramatic story of the people and events that shaped the world's first railway network, one of the most impressive engineering achievements in history. From the early days of steam to electrification, via the railways' contribution to twentieth-century industrial design and the precarious future of the train, Fire and Steam examines the cultural, social and economical importance of the railway and how it helped to form the Britain of today.

Christian Wolmar is a writer and broadcaster. His previous books include Broken Rails: How Privatisation Wrecked Britain's Railways, Down the Tube: The Battle For London's Underground and, most recently The Subterranean Railway.

A C Grayling is one of Britain's leading thinkers. Professor in Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London, and a fellow of St. Anne's College, Oxford, the multi-talented author of the best-selling The Meaning of Things, The Reason of Things and The Mystery of Things believes that philosophy should take an active, useful role in society, rather than withdrawing to the proverbial ivory tower. His latest book, Towards The Light: The Story of the Struggles for Liberty and Rights that Made the Modern West presents an inspirational history of ideas in action.

Also a columnist for The Times and a regular contributor to the Observer, Economist, Literary Review, New Statesman and Prospect, A C Grayling is a Fellow of the World Economic Forum and an advisor on many committees ranging from Drug Testing at Work to human rights groups.

Supported by Bloomsbury

With short stories written and performed by Will Buckingham, Helen Cross, Lindsey Davis, Mil Millington and Nicola Monaghan

Five stories which have been specially commissioned by readers groups in the West Midlands area, to be premiered at the Birmingham Book Festival and then broadcast on BBC Radio Four.  The readers groups involved are from Shropshire, Walsall, Solihull and Herefordshire. Five short stories will be recorded for broadcast on BBC Radio Four in March 2008.

Presented in association with BBC Radio Four and the West Midlands Readers’ Network

Jonathan Coe is the author of several novels including The Dwarves of Death, and the acclaimed What a Carve Up!,winner of the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger. His novel The Rotters' Club told the story of a group of school friends in 1970's Birmingham and was adapted for BBC Television. A sequel, The Closed Circle, was published in 2004. The Rain Before It Falls, his new novel, is a story of generations, of the relationships within a family - and of what goes to make a child.

Supported by Penguin

A recording for future broadcast of two editions of BBC Radio Four's well-loved book programme. Sue MacGregor and special guests discuss and recommend favourite books - essential listening for book lovers.

Presented in association with BBC Radio Four

Lionel Shriver's novels include The Female of the Species, Ordinary Decent Criminal, A Perfectly Good Family and Double Fault. She is also a journalist and contributes regularly to The Guardian. Her Orange Prize winning novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin, was highly acclaimed for its depiction of the relationship between a career mother and her disturbingly cruel son.

This year Lionel returned with The Post Birthday World, an imaginative and entertaining look at the implications, large and small, of whom we choose to love. Using a playful parallel-universe structure, The Post-Birthday World follows one woman's future as it unfolds under the influence of two drastically different men.

Featuring: Deborah Moggach, Maureen Freely, Catherine O'Flynn and Roger Ellory.

The Festival Readers' Day is a glorious opportunity to meet four fascinating writers and to be part of a wonderful conversation about reading. A combination of talks and discussion sessions, the Readers' Day is for anyone who loves books.

Our guest writers include novelist and screenwriter Deborah Moggach, author of In the Dark and the screenplay for the recent film Pride and Prejudice starring Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyn. Also participating are Maureen Freely, whose latest novel is Enlightenment, a dark drama set in Istanbul, and Birmingham-based writers Catherine O'Flynn, whose debut novel is What Was Lost, and Roger Ellory, whose latest thriller is A Quiet Belief In Angels.

Supported by Random House, Tindal Street Press and Marion Boyars

Jasvinder Sanghera was fifteen when she ran away from home to escape a forced marriage to a much older man she'd never met. She had to move constantly, wary of being tracked down for betraying her family's honour. Her three years in hiding ended with the news that her sister had committed suicide by setting herself alight.

Jasvinder is now working for the charities Refuge and Karma Nirvana - the Asian women's charity she founded. Jasvinder's book speaks openly and honestly about her experiences and those of the many other women she has met through her work.

Supported by Hodder & Stoughton

Val McDermid grew up in a Scottish mining community then read English at Oxford. She was a journalist for sixteen years, spending the last three as Northern Bureau Chief of a national Sunday tabloid. She has won a CWA Gold Dagger, The Portico Prize, The Barry Award and The New York Times Notable Book Award, amongst many others. A new ITV series based on her book, The Wire in the Blood, featuring Robson Green and Simone Lahbib, has achieved great acclaim this year, as has her most recent novel Beneath The Bleeding.

Supported by Harper Collins

In the summer of 2006 five unpublished Black and Asian Birmingham writers submitted a short story for development under the guidance of experienced writers.

The resulting anthology, Original Skin, is comprised of ten stories from both the unpublished writers and their more experienced mentors. Topics range from crime and mental health to love and relationships.

The established writers are; Ava Ming and Yvonne Brissett (who are also co-editors) Rubina Din, Maeve Clarke, and Zulfiqar Ali. The new writers are; Tina Freeth, Nathan Stewart, Helena Perrett, Roy McFarlane, & Farana Ahktar

Presented in association with Birmingham Libraries

Jim Crace is widely regarded as an innovative and highly original writer with a powerful ability to create imaginary worlds and landscapes. His first book, Continent won the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Guardian Fiction Prize and the David Higham Prize for Fiction. He was awarded the E. M. Forster Award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1992 and became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999.

Jim is an entertaining and inspiring commentator on his own work and comes to the Festival to introduce us to his latest novel, The Pesthouse.

Supported by Penguin.

The Birmingham Book Festival is delighted to welcome Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones, one of the most read and discussed novels of recent years. She is also author of the memoir Lucky, the harrowing story of her own experience of rape. She writes for the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune and was chosen by New York's Village Voice as a 'Writer on the Verge'. Alice lives in California with her husband, author Glen David Gold. The Almost Moon is Alice's third book, and is an incredible feat - taking us into the mind of a woman as she steps over the line into committing an unthinkable act.

Supported by Picador