Foreword Festival UK

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!


Foreword Festival founders Rachel Churcher and Jackie Carreira with the festival banner, outside the Guildhall in Bury St Edmunds in 2023.
Foreword Festival founders Rachel Churcher and Jackie Carreira with the 2023 festival banner.

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!

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!

Foreword Festival founders Rachel Churcher and Jackie Carreira with their bookstall.
Suffolk Author MT McGuire with her books at the Love Your Local Authors book fair 2024.
Authors from Resolute Books with their bookstall at the Love Your Local Authors book fair 2024.
Author Rebecca Fox with her bookstall at the Love Your Local Authors event, 2024.