A Highland author whose hit novel was turned into a film starring Holywood actress Scarlett Johansson will have an entire conference dedicated to his work for the first time.
The University of the Highlands and Islands will host the two-day event on the writing of Michel Faber this summer.
Born in Holland and raised in Australia, Mr Faber has lived and worked in Ross-shire for more than 20 years.
He shot to fame with his first novel, Under the Skin, which was set on the A9 Perth to Thurso road, and adapted into an award-winning Glasgow-set film that was directed by Jonathan Glazer and starred Scarlett Johansson as the main character.
Mr Faber also won last year’s Saltire Book of the Year award for his work, The Book of Strange New Things.
At the “Defying Genre: Michel Faber” conference in Inverness, the author will give a reading, share some of his unpublished works and engage directly with the speakers’ papers.
Timothy Baker, a lecturer on Scottish literature at Aberdeen University, will be the keynote speaker at the event, which is due to run on July 21 and 22.
The organisers have invited proposals for papers that could be discussed at the conference, with May 13 set as the deadline.
Unveiling the plans for the event, they said: “Michel Faber constantly defies genre, and challenges our grasp of fictional modes.
“Winner of the 2015 Saltire Book of the Year award for A Book of Strange New Things, Faber is omnipresent in the public sphere, but his work is only just beginning to receive critical scholarly attention.
“With the notable exceptions of Under the Skin and The Crimson Petal and the White, his wide-ranging work is on the edges of current literary studies.
“This conference – the first devoted to Michel Faber – seeks to rectify this, by allowing both new and established scholars the opportunity to engage with Faber’s work.”
Mr Faber’s first published book was a collection of short stories, Some Rain Must Fall, in 1998.
Of the stories, the title piece won the Ian St James Award in 1996, “Fish” won the Macallan Prize in 1996, and “Half a Million Pounds and a Miracle” won the Neil Gunn Award in 1997.
Under the Skin, published in 2000, was translated into many languages and was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award.
