Three relatives of Nelson Mandela, including his youngest daughter, Zindzi, are to visit Scottish inmates and their families as part of the Edinburgh international book festival in August.

Zindzi Mandela, South Africa’s ambassador to Denmark, will take the former leader’s great-granddaughters Zazi, eight, and Ziwelene, seven, to a private reading and discussion in the family unit of Shotts prison in North Lanarkshire.

The event is being linked to the publication of Grandad Mandela, an illustrated book that discusses 15 questions put to the former African National Congress party president by children about his life in jail.

In a separate event, members of the New York-based rap collective The Last Poets will meet and perform for inmates at Edinburgh prison.

The Mandelas’ appearance at the festival, their only book festival event in the UK, is part of this year’s theme of freedom in the era of Brexit, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin’s policies.



Nick Barley, the festival’s director, said: “We believe book festivals are not simply about reading and literacy. They’re about public discourse. What we create at the book festival, alongside the other great festivals in this city, is a space for grassroots democracy, to think through why the world is the way it is.”

With many of its venues expanding in size and spreading to neighbouring streets and sites, the festival has commissioned 52 authors and poets from 25 countries to write for a collection to be called the Freedom Papers, on areas such as race, religion, migration, technology and gender.

Other significant appearances will include the Kenyan novelist and playwright Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, with a new edition of his prison memoir Wrestling with the Devil. Barley said wa Thiong’o has been widely tipped as a future Nobel prize winner for literature.

The festival has appointed an Iranian artist, Ehsan Abdollahi, who was initially refused a visa to attend last year’s event by the Home Office, as illustrator in residence.

Jeremy Corbyn will appear in conversation with Greece’s former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, one of the festival’s four guest selections. Barley suggested the Labour leader could challenge orthodox liberal thinking on Brexit, Trump and Putin.

Other significant names at the festival include the psychoanalyst Susie Orbach, the Norwegian novelist Dag Solstad, the British author Philip Pullman, who will explore ideas around fairytales, and Chelsea Clinton. She will present her books on women who shaped history – She Persisted and She Persisted Around the World – at two separate events for children and adults.

The festival’s spiegeltent, the venue for music, poetry and art events, will host the first staging since 1961 of Doctors of Philosophy, the only play written by Muriel Spark, one of Edinburgh’s most famous literary figures. Spark, who wrote The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, is being honoured by the city with a year-long celebration of the 100th anniversary of her birth.