Golden Ticket 2026

In her compelling follow-up to Skirly Crag, Helen Percy invites you back into the enchanting yet challenging world of rugged moorland life in Whistlebare.

The eldest son of a Master Woodworker, Callum Robinson spent his childhood surrounded by wood and trees, absorbing craft lessons in his father’s workshop, playing amongst the sycamore, oak and Scots pine that bordered his home. Faced with the end of his business, his team and everything he had worked so hard to build, he was forced to question what mattered most.

Enjoy a delicious Western Isles lunch with Alex Gray, an award-winning Scottish crime writer, and author of 23 novels.  Born and raised in Glasgow, she taught English for ten years after a brief spell as a folk singer she became a full-time novelist, on retiring from teaching, and her first novel, Never Somewhere Else, published in 2003 introduced her character of William Lorimer.

In a powerful combination of contemporary neuroscience, psychoanalysis and brilliant storytelling The Well Gardened Mind investigates the magic that many gardeners have known for years – working with nature can radically transform our health, wellbeing and confidence.

Local historian and writer, Mhairi has been instrumental in setting up and managing the Oban Heritage Group and developing a heritage trail around the town. She puts her comprehensive knowledge of the town and surrounding area into her latest book An t-Òban – The People and The Place ...

Gordon Buchanan is probably the best-known natural history cameraman the BBC has ever produced. His dedication to his craft means he often spends weeks inside a cramped camera hide, all in search of that one extraordinary shot. But dangerous animals were not the only thing he was hiding from.

From his bedroom window in the bank house, Tobermory, Lorn Macintyre could see the site of the sunken Spanish Armada galleon with its supposed cargo of gold coins, worth many millions. The stories of obsessed salvors he heard about in Tobermory ...

Colin MacIntyre is a multi-award-winning songwriter, musician, producer, author, playwright, broadcaster & educator, also known as the Mull Historical Society. Born into a family of storytellers on the isle of Mull, his debut novel, The Letters of Ivor Punch, won the 2015 Edinburgh Book Festival First Book Award.

Most people associate deer management with Queen Victoria and Landseer’s Monarch of the Glen and assume that is the way it has always been and always will be. However, in the absence of natural predators the way we manage deer in Scotland is a choice.

Alistair Moffat tells the extraordinary story of the Highlands in the most detailed book ever written about this remarkable part of Scotland.

Witch hunts ripped through the country for over 150 years, with at least 4,000 accused, and with many women's fates sealed by a grizzly execution of strangulation, followed by burning.  Inspired to correct this historic injustice, campaigners and writers Zoe Venditozzi and Claire Mitchell KC have delved deeply into just why the trials exploded in Scotland to such a degree.

What is it like to live on an island of one's own? Set on an inaccessible land encircled by high cliffs, one dangerous footpath that leads down to a rocky shoreline, and no boat, Eva and the Island is journalist and author Tim Ecott's meticulous observation of the brutal reality of farming and a vanishing, but remarkable, way of life.

Join us for an entertaining evening in the company of writer, librettist, musician,  prolific novelist and Patron of the Tobermory Book Festival, Sir Alexander McCall Smith.  After a delicious three course Western Isles dinner, Sandy will tell tall tales and regale us with his exciting escapades, including a recent musical collaboration with our own Mull Historical Society.