Jenny Colgan & Mike Gayle In Conversation

We are delighted to have globally-renowned authors and very good friends, Jenny Colgan and Mike Gayle, joining us to close this year's festival and chat about their writing careers.

About Our Authors

Jenny Colgan is one of Scotland’s greatest exports. In a career spanning over 25 years she has sold over 9 million copies worldwide. A former stand-up comedian, Jenny’s books are celebrated as ‘Feel Good Fiction’ in many of the countries where they are published. And after many years of ‘romantic fiction’ being pigeonholed or side-lined, Jenny is at the forefront of writers who are now directly addressing just why things haven’t progressed since the time of Austen, what the genre truly means and why it is, and always has been, so important for so many. She is married with three children and divides her time between a castle on the coast of Fife and a flat in Edinburgh’s West End. She is the author of numerous Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling novels and has won various awards for her writing, including the Melissa Nathan Award for Comedy Romance, the RNA Romantic Novel of the Year Award and the RNA Romantic Comedy Novel of the Year Award. 

Jenny's Latest Book: The Summer Skies

Meet Morag, a pilot born into a family of successful pilots who is forced to pass up the opportunity of working in Dubai in order to return to her family home on a Scottish island. Her grandfather who normally flies the local route has been taken ill and it is down to Morag to ferry locals in his Cessna Twin Otter for the family company MacIntyre Air.

When the weather takes a dramatic turn, Morag is forced to crash-land on a remote island and suddenly finds herself far from civilisation and all alone. Until she encounters Gregor, a gruff and reclusive ornithologist taking care of the islands for the season. With no choice but to seek shelter at his cabin, the pair are stuck together until help arrives. Might Morag discover that a remote Scottish island, cut off from real-life is exactly the place she needs to be?

Mike Gayle was born and raised in Birmingham. After graduating from Salford University with a degree in Sociology, he moved to London to pursue a career in journalism and worked as a features editor and agony uncle. He has written for a variety of publications including The Sunday Times, the Guardian and Cosmopolitan. Mike became a full-time novelist in 1997 following the publication of his Sunday Times top ten bestseller My Legendary Girlfriend, which was hailed by the Independent as ‘full of belly laughs and painfully acute observations’, and by The Times as ‘a funny, frank account of a hopeless romantic’. Since then he has written eighteen novels, including The Man I Think I Know, selected as a World Book Night title, and Half A World Away, selected for the Richard and Judy Book Club. His books have been translated into more than thirty languages. In 2021, Mike was the recipient of the Outstanding Achievement Award from the Romantic Novelists’ Association.

Mike's Latest Book: A Song For Me and You

Helen and Ben parted as heartbroken 18-year-olds and went their very separate ways.  Twenty years later, mother-of-two-teenagers Helen is still in Manchester, a part-time primary teacher, stunned by the behaviour of her love-rat husband. In an old T shirt and scruffy jeans, she feels at the lowest point in her life.  And suddenly, impossibly, Ben is standing on her doorstep. Tired maybe, lonely even, but clearly still the world-famous, LA-based multi-millionaire rockstar he has become.  Can you ever go back?  For Helen and Ben, so much has happened in the years between. But just to sit in the kitchen for a while and talk – that would be nice.  Before the world comes crashing in.