Travel writing features strongly on the bill for the Edinburgh International Book Festival (August 12-28). Earlier this year the organisers sent five Scottish writers across the Americas, each one travelling with a local writer, to “interrogate the socio-political landscape” of the region. These “Outriders” — including Matthew Tallack (author of Sixty Degrees North), who travelled from Fargo to Tennessee with the Boston-based novelist Jennifer Haigh — will be reporting in a series of events on what they saw and heard.

Other speakers include Garrett Carr, author of The Rule of the Land, about walking the Irish border; Julian Sayarer, whose story of hitch-hiking across the United States, Interstate, was the last Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year; and Madeleine Bunting, whose Love of Country, on her journeys through the Hebrides, has been short-listed for this year’s Wainwright Prize for nature/travel writing focused on the United Kingdom.

André Naffis-Sahely — who was born in Venice to an Iranian father and an Italian mother but grew up in Abu Dhabi —  will be introducing his debut poetry collection The Promised Land (Penguin), which tells of itinerant lives in “disposable cities”.