I'm in the Scottish Power Studio Theatre, talking with another of the press pod inhabitants about Moscow and waiting for the lights to dim.

An hour after launching the book on the other side of Charlotte Square, Amnesty International are promoting Freedom, a compilation of writing on human rights to match the 60th anniversary of the signing of the International Declaration of Human Rights. Xioalu Guo, Marina Lewycka and Gabriella Ambrosio have all contributed to the project, and are here to read their work.

Chair John Watson begins by advocating the role of fiction in human rights, referring to the empathy which can be accessed by a reader placing themselves in the story.

Lewycka begins by reading her violent and disturbing story of human trafficking, told from the perspective of an urban pimp. She is followed by Guo, whose story is interrupted by a power outage. When we're told that the outage affects the whole site, the panel decide to continue reading by torchlight. Ambrosio's story of police brutality during the Italian G8 summit is thick with fury and frustration.

The square is dark and windy by the time we emerge from the tent. I'm particularly affected by Lewycka's prose; the barbaric reality of what happens every day in our own city and all over the world is aptly conveyed in fiction, and this event is one of the most internationally relevant I've attended this month.