Nobel Prize winners Seamus Heaney, Harold Pinter and Joseph Stiglitz lead the line-up at the 2006 Edinburgh International Book Festival.
Playwright Pinter and poet Heaney will do "meet the author" sessions at the event, which runs from 12 - 28 August.
Economist Stiglitz will host a talk about the effects of globalisation.
More than 35 countries are represented at the festival, featuring 650 events. Other famous names to appear will include Sarah Waters and Tony Benn.
Poet laureate Andrew Motion and authors Irvine Welsh, Ian Rankin, Ismail Kadare and PD James will also take part.
Denis Healey, a former Cabinet minister and deputy leader of the Labour party, is also due to appear.
Expansion
"We are immensely proud of this year's programme, bringing as it does some of the world's foremost political and economic thinkers to Scotland," festival director Catherine Lockerbie said.
Guests for the children's programme will include Jacqueline Wilson, Alexander McCall Smith and Michael Morpurgo.
The festival is also expanding, with Margaret Atwood, Martin Amis, William Boyd and Chancellor Gordon Brown appearing at an offshoot event from 4-10 October.
The Edinburgh International Book Festival began in 1983, when crime writer Ian Rankin covered it as a journalist for a student newspaper.
In 1997, an unknown JK Rowling read from the first Harry Potter book to just 30 children.
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