Whether you are a new or returning visitor I hope you will find our programme exciting, challenging, and entertaining. Where else must one choose between an archbishop and the Beatles’ hairdresser?

When launched in 2014, nobody envisaged how the Festival would grow to include so wide a range of subjects and speakers, with an international perspective and speakers with global reputations, whilst supporting local writers and regional interests.

Our speaker programme includes Zoom events, so that audiences far away from Berwick can also enjoy sessions that speak to the world, and events in the town. For the first time it includes major productions in partnership with The Maltings. We have our popular workshops and tours, fiction and poetry, history, and humour. This Festival is volunteer-run, sponsored by local people and businesses to whom we are most grateful, and without large corporate funding. It is not an event to promote the latest bestsellers or celebrity authors but to hear writers with established reputations as well as emerging new voices.

Please visit our website for details of the charitable events the Festival supports, thanks to its Patrons, sponsors, and ticket sales: the enrichment events organised for the area’s schools, young people’s events in the Library, poetry reading in care homes, and with the Rotary Club, the schools shortstory competition. None of this would be possible without your support from ticket sales. The increased costs of rewarding our speakers fairly and running the Festival have meant a rise in ticket prices, but we remain convinced that you will be amused, informed, and enlightened by our most exciting programme yet.

I look forward to your visit to Berwick in October, whether online or in person; and when you’re here, do explore our fascinating walled town.

Michael Gallico, Festival Director