Literary Traveller in EdinburghA Book Lover's Guide to the World's First City of Literature

For centuries, Edinburgh has been home, inspiration and muse to writers. Robert Louis Stevenson, Muriel Spark, Sir Walter Scott and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were born in the city. John Buchan, J.M. Barrie and Robert Burns lived there. Visiting literati who praised and condemned it include Dickens, Defoe, Tennyson, Thackeray, Dr Johnson and George Eliot, while poets Robert Garioch, Sorley Maclean, Norman MacCaig, Alan Bold and Hugh MacDiarmid drank Edinburgh pubs dry in the 1950s, '60s and '70s. The city has inspired classic and controversial works of literature such as The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Regeneration and the novels of Irvine Welsh and Ian Rankin. Edinburgh's main railway terminus, Waverley, was named after the novel by Sir Walter Scott, and how many other cities can boast a memorial to a native author that dominates its skyline as does the Scott Monument on Princes Street? Added to this, the Edinburgh International Book Festival is now the largest book festival in the world.
Exploring Edinburgh's literary past and present is synonymous with exploring and traversing the great city itself - a city which truly deserves the accolade World City of Literature.