New College Festival - Karine Polwart featuring Dave Milligan

Karine Polwart is in conversation with pianist Dave Milligan at Martin Hall, New College on Friday 6 November, from 7:30pm to 8:30pm. It's part of the New College Festival of Books and Belief, presented by the School of Divinity, so it's a talk with music rather than a straight gig. Dr Roxani Krystalli, a Senior Lecturer at the University of St Andrews whose book Good Victims won the Lee Ann Fujii prize, will be chairing the evening.

Polwart is a Scottish musician, writer and theatre maker whose work draws on place, hidden histories, scientific enquiry and folklore. She's been working across a few different worlds lately: she was the Dr Gavin Wallace Fellow 2025-26 via the Fruitmarket in Edinburgh and a Paul Hamlyn Fellow 2023-25, collaborating with Pippa Murphy. Two of her recent projects should give you a sense of where her head is at. Windblown (Hudson Records, 2026) is a multimedia tribute to a 200-year-old Sabal palm at Edinburgh's Royal Botanic Garden, and Spell Songs (Folk by the Oak, 2026) is a multi-artist response to environmental loss.

Dave Milligan is a genre-defying pianist who has worked with Mark Knopfler, Larry Carlton, Trilok Gurtu and Camille O'Sullivan, and co-founded The Unusual Suspects, a 22-piece folk-supergroup. He'll be on piano for the night, so you'll get to hear Polwart's songs and stories with live accompaniment rather than just a conversation. Between the two of them, there's a lot of ground to cover: the botanic garden, environmental loss, and the folklore and hidden histories that usually sit at the heart of Polwart's work.

It's a single hour, 7:30pm to 8:30pm, at Martin Hall, New College, School of Divinity, Mound Place, Edinburgh EH1 2LX.