It’s a while since I’ve been to Edinburgh. This year’s bill for the Book Festival (August 11-27), which is now online, is making me think I should be booking for the duration. Writing on travel and place is particularly well represented. Tickets will be on sale from June 26.

  Rory MacLean will be talking about In North Korea, a book with which he and the photographer Nick Danziger aim “to catch a glimpse of life away from the performance, as it is lived in the world’s most secretive nation, at a turning point in its history”.

  Richard Lloyd Parry will discuss Ghosts of the Tsunami, his account, told through the stories of survivors, of the 2011 earthquake in north-east Japan (a book that recently won him the £20,000 Rathbones Folio Prize).

  Tim Dee (author of The Running Sky and Four Fields), will talk about Ground Work, the collection he has edited of writing on connections between place and people.

  Rose George (author of Deep Sea and Foreign Going), Maya Jasanoff (author of The Dawn Watch, about Joseph Conrad and globalisation) and the Brazilian philosopher Djamila Ribeiro, a major figure in the Afro-Brazilian women’s rights movement, will discuss the seas as a space for trading.

   James Campbell of the TLS and Rosemary Goring, literary editor of The Herald, will consider the city of bedsits, bachelors and bombed-out buildings that is “Muriel Spark’s London”.

  Graham Robb will talk about The Debatable Land, a territory that once lay between Scotland and England but belonged to neither.

  Alastair McIntosh (author of Poacher’s Pilgrimage, a journey through the Outer Hebrides) will compare notes with Guy Stagg (author of The Crossway, about a walk from Canterbury to Jerusalem, due to be published by Picador on June 14).

  Suzy Hansen (who writes for The New York Times Magazine from Turkey and is author of  Notes on a Foreign Country) and Sarah Rainsford (witness for the BBC to the end of Cuba’s Castro era and author of Our Woman in Havana) will offer “portraits of countries that American influence can barely reach and… discuss the issue of America’s place on the global stage”.

  Ian Buruma, editor of The New York Review of Books, will discuss his memoir of 1970s Japan, A Tokyo Romance.

  Abir Mukherjee, Sandip Roy, Nalini Paul and Sampurna Chattarji will mark 70 years of Indian independence by mapping the connections, ancient and contemporary, between Scotland and India.

  Bruno Maçães, who was Portugal’s Europe Minister from 2013 to 2015, will present The Dawn of Eurasia, which “weaves together history, diplomacy and vivid reports of a six-month journey from Baku to Samarkand, Vladivostok to Beijing… in an effort to persuade us that our future lies in developing a supercontinent called Eurasia”.

  The Canadian-born artist and poet JR Carpenter and the Catalan writer Alicia Kopf will discuss polar explorations. The former’s collection An Ocean of Static “is generated from ship logs and code language”; the latter has written a hybrid novel, Brother in Ice, “from research notes, a fictionalised diary and a travelogue of polar exploration”.

  Claudio Magris (author of Danube and, most recently, a collection of essays, Journeying) and Francis Spufford (whose novel Golden Hill won last year’s RSL Ondaatje Prize and whose latest work is True Stories & Other Essays), will talk on the theme that “Life is a journey”.