Foreword Festival UK

Great news! The Foreword Festival will return in 2025 for another celebration of literature that’s outside the mainstream.

We’re already planning next year’s literary fringe festival, but in the meantime we’ve been running pop-up Foreword Festival events to promote local authors and entertain local readers.

We had an amazing day at our Young Adult Book Festival on Saturday 14th September!

Check out our photos and book recommendations from the event.

Our Pay it Foreword event, raising money and awareness for charities and great causes, was a success! Thank you to everyone who came along, met the authors and bought books.
Every book made a difference!


Join our mailing list to have event announcements sent directly to your inbox, and keep an eye on our blog and events pages for more information. Whether you’re an author or a reader (or both) – we’d love to see you at our next event!


Thank you to everyone who came and said hello to the Foreword Festival team at the Primadonna Festival in July! We had a fantastic weekend, meeting authors, readers, and festival-goers. Special thanks to everyone who took part in our ten-word story challenge – you can read the amazing entries here!

Our pick of the best:


We did it! It happened! The first literary fringe festival in the UK has been an adventure, and a fantastic bookish weekend. A huge THANK YOU from your hosts, Jackie Carreira and Rachel Churcher, to all our authors, visitors and supporters. We couldn’t have done it without you! 

Foreword Festival thank you list
Click the image for a larger version!

We invited authors, independent publishers, and speakers from around the UK for a celebration of literature that’s outside the mainstream. We’ve played host to authors of graphic novels, SF and fantasy, comedy, poetry, children’s books, non-fiction and more, as well as offering workshops for writers, and help with getting your work into print.

We held our festival book fair, workshops, author panels and children’s storytelling in the gorgeous Guildhall in Bury St Edmunds – a building with 1000 years of history.

In addition, actors from the QuirkHouse Theatre Company gave FREE live readings of stories from our Fast Foreword flash fiction event on Saturday 7th October, at various venues in Bury St Edmunds.

We’ll be running more literary events in and around Bury St Edmunds – watch this space for news of future events!

Foreword Festival