The Foreword Festival is back!
9th-16th August 2025,
across various venues in Stowmarket, Suffolk.
Add the dates to your diary,
and join our mailing list for news and updates.
The Foreword Festival team is busy planning this summer’s literary fringe festival, and it’s going to be even bigger and better than last time! We’re looking forward to bringing together authors, poets, performers and readers for another celebration of literature that’s outside the mainstream. Stowmarket, here we come!
Foreword Festival UK is now a Community Interest Company!
Meet the new faces on our team.
To keep up to date with our plans, join our mailing list, check our blog, and follow us on BlueSky and Instagram!
We’re brining back our fantastic Fast Foreword flash fiction competition and guerrilla storytelling event for 2025. Enter the FREE competition for the chance to have your short story professionally performed at one of our venues in August!
The Foreword Festival exists to showcase ‘fringe’ authors and performers who may not usually be included in mainstream literary festivals, and to bring them together with readers, reluctant readers, and lapsed readers, who may not feel welcome or represented at mainstream literary festivals.
We don’t have a single festival site or building. Instead, we’re working with various venues in the centre of Stowmarket to bring books, authors, literary activities and spoken-word performances out into the community for the week of the festival, and to encourage and support a love of reading.
Check out our programme for 2025!
We ran our first Foreword Festival in October 2023 in Bury St Edmunds. Since then, we’ve been running pop-up Foreword Festival events to promote local authors and entertain local readers, and we’ve taken part in other events to promote our festival.
Here’s what we’ve been up to!
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!
