Harmony Marquee, Thursday, June 19, at 9.30pm (£8, £6)

Ali Smith comes to Melrose with her star firmly in the ascendancy, having already lifted the £5,000 fiction category in this year’s Sundial Scottish Arts Council Awards.

After her Thursday appearance, the Inverness-born writer will be at the glittering award ceremony hosted the following evening by Rory Bremner, where Smith and the other category winners will learn if they have won the overall award and a cheque for £25,000.

The 45-year-old, now based in Cambridge, had already earned a reputation as one of Britain’s most exciting and inventive novelists before the publication last year of her Sundial winner Girl Meets Boy (The Myth of Isis). Two of her previous works, Hotel World (2001) and The Accidental (2004), were both shortlised for the Booker Prize and contain passages of pure brilliance.

In Girl Meets Boy, Smith remixes Ovid’s most joyful metamorphosis. It is a story about the kind of fluidity that cannot be bottled and sold; it’s about girls and boys, girls and girls, love and transformation, a story of puns and doubles, reversals and revelations.

Funny and fresh, poetic and political, Girl meets Boy is a myth of metamorphosis for the modern world.

In Melrose, Smith will be in conversation with Dr Gavin Wallace, head of literature at the Scottish Arts Council.

PIERS BRENDON

Harmony Marquee, Friday, June 20, at 8pm (£8,£6)

Piers Brendon is the author of a dozen books, including biographies of Churchill, Eisenhower, the Windsors and Hawker of Morwenstow. He won huge critical acclaim for The Dark Valley, an extraordinary historical analysis of Britain in the 1930s.

He also writes for television and contributes regularly to the national press. Formerly a keeper of the Churchill Archives Centre, he is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge.

In Melrose, Brendon will discuss his most recent volume, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781-1997.

Published 60 years after India’s independence, half-a-century after Ghana’s and a decade after the handover of Hong Kong, it is a vivid work of unparallelled scholarship which traces the descent of the Empire further back than ever before.

Brendon contends that, even in Victorian times, Britain was a weak world power.