Dig out your Ladz On Tour t-shirts: Beloved Glasgow indie Cargo Publishing has announced a jaunt up north for the third year of its Margins book and music festival, expanding its cavalcade of novelists, poets, indie and folk musicians, and other assorted drunks to encompass, for the first time, Margins Aberdeen. The festival’s inaugural northern leg will see it take over Woodend Barn Arts Centre in the rural town of Banchory – around a half hour drive from Aberdeen city centre – from 31 May to 2 June.

The weekend’s full line-up will be released, along with tickets starting at £1 apiece, in April, but a few initial names have been confirmed: Comedy legend turned historical novelist Robert Newman will be there – no doubt talking about his forthcoming novel with Cargo, The Trade Secret – as will Edinburgh art-poppers FOUND, Sky Sports man Graham Hunter, Barrhead’s own Chris Brookmyre, and Ewan Morrison, the man with the amazing power to light a house for a year purely by harnessing the collective fury of The Guardian‘s comments section.

Cargo MD Mark Buckland says of the festival’s northwards surge: ‘We’re really pleased that we get to bring the festival to a new audience and in a particularly beautiful setting. We’d been looking to expand Margins for a while and Woodend Barn is the perfect setting to bring it to. It’s going to be a belter of a weekend.’ No word of a lie, if the huge success of last year’s efforts at Glasgow’s Arches is anything to go by.

Weegies and other lowlanders shouldn’t feel too left out, incidentally: The Glasgow leg of Margins will return in October, once again occupying the Arches and potentially expanding even further beyond its current position as one of the five biggest book festivals in Scotland. Really, at this rate, it’ll soon be more Blob than festival.