William Dalrymple, Irvine Welsh and Frank Cottrell-Boyce to speak at the Wigtown Book Festival

Novelist Irvine Welsh, historian William Dalrymple and Channel 4 international editor Lindsey Hilsum will be speaking at this year’s Wigtown Book Festival.

Other events include children’s authors Frank Cottrell-Boyce and Pari Thomson, as well as performance poet Pam Ayres and authors David Baddiel and Helena Kelly.

The festival will feature more than 250 events with Scottish authors like Andrew O’Hagan and Abir Mukherjee, as well as debut novelists Ali Millar, Tom Newlands and Elle Machray.

There will also be a “festival within a festival” of food hosted by the "Hebridean Baker" Coinneach MacLeod, who will launch The Hebridean Baker: The Scottish Cookbook (Black & White Publishing) at the festival.

Also taking part in the festival will be Coinneach’s partner Peter MacQueen, author of The Art of Hutting (Black & White Publishing), a guide to living "off grid", in line with the festival’s environmental theme.

A central strand will be "Change the Stories", which looks at how to tell "new stories" about climate change. The festival will also be launching a new sustainable transport initiative, encouraging visitors to share transport and providing extra bus links.

This year’s Magnusson Lecture, in honour of the broadcaster and academic Magnus Magnusson, will be given by Tessa Boase on Etta Lemon, the woman who co-founded the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB).

The James Mirrlees Lecture, which marks the life of the locally-born Nobel Prize-winning economist, will be given by Sophie Yeo, author of Nature’s Ghosts (HarperNorth).

Lee Randall, the festival’s programmer, said: “I hope this year’s programme, with all its range and reach, proves a hit with our regular visitors while also enticing first-timers into the fold.”

The festival will also see the announcement of the winners of the annual international Wigtown Poetry Prizes for poems in Scotland’s three indigenous languages: English, Scots and Gaelic.

The former BBC Scotland political editor Brian Taylor will present the third Anne Brown Essay Prize for Scotland. Last year’s winner, Rodge Glass, will return to the festival with his memoir, Joshua in the Sky (Taproot Press).

A tour of bookshops will be led by Diary of a Bookseller author Shaun Bythell (Profile Books) and Ben Please of The Bookshop Band.