SCOTLAND'S best-selling crime author will rub shoulders with one of Britain's best-known TV news presenters at this year's Cove and Kilcreggan Book Festival.

Rebus creator Ian Rankin and Channel 4 News broadcaster Jon Snow are among a stellar line-up for the annual event, which takes place over the weekend of November 25 and 26 at Cove Burgh Hall.

Crowds are expected to flock to the Peninsula for the annual event, which regularly attracts some of the biggest names in the literary world from Britain and beyond.

The second day of this year's festival majors on a 'food and drink' theme, with appearances by BBC Radio 4 presenter Aasmah Mir and her sister Uzma, who have set up a website, 'Cracking Curries', inspired by their mother's curry recipes, and by Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow, the founder of the Mary's Meals charity.

Other writers set to feature in the course of the weekend include:

- Jim Carruth, the 'Glasgow Makar' and agricultural poet, who is poet-in-residence at the Royal Highland Show and whose verse, unsurprisingly, majors on rural and farming life;

- Sarah Trevelyan, the former wife of gangster-turned-writer Jimmy Boyle, who has written a memoir about their meeting, their prison romance and their marriage;

- Paul Macalinden, the Scots-born conductor who formed the National Youth Orchestra of Iraq in the midst of the country's war and is now setting up a chamber orchestra in Govan;

- Rachel McCormack, a regular on BBC Radio 4's Kitchen Cabinet panel show, whose new book on whisky is called Chasing The Dram;

- Sue Lawrence, the Scottish food writer and novelist who has just produced The Scottish Soup Bible.