21st Nairn Book and Arts Festival set to show the town’s Wild Side
Nairn Book and Arts Festival parade
Image credit: Marc Marnie
Article published30/08/2024
Nairn Book and Arts Festival is set to launch this Saturday (31 August). It will kick off with a Town Centre Takeover – a day of free performance, street theatre, poetry and live music ending with A Walk on the Wild Side fancy dress parade.
Ahead of its start, the festival has broken all of its previous records for ticket sales.
The festival’s theme this year is Wild Sides (Wilder Edges). The broad ranging programme features the following people:
author and playwright Irvine Welsh
broadcaster and writer Sally Magnusson
author and presenter James Crawford
former Makar and lauded poet Jackie Kay
BAFTA winning composer John Lunn.
It encompasses a varied range of live music and performance. This includes leading Scottish singer songwriter Findlay Napier, literary-folk duo The Bookshop Band and Early Scots music from Laudonia.
Nairn Book and Arts Festival (credit: VisitScotland / Rob McDougall)
More about what’s on
The festival is bookended by two family-friendly days of free outdoor performance. There will also be slam poetry, street art, music, nature-based activities and fancy dress parades.
Creative workshops include short story writing, screenwriting, editing, and painting in the wild.
Tours take in Nairn Golf Club’s unique archive, the extensive art collection at Cawdor Castle and Nairn’s Black Isle Bronze Foundry.
Audiences have responded very enthusiastically to our programme this year - its popularity is reflected in our record -breaking ticket sales. We have more author events, featuring well-known and respected names such as Irvine Welsh, Jackie Kay and Sally Magnusson, but also exciting young debut authors such as C.E. McGill and Victoria MacKenzie.
We will be joined by Findlay Napier, one of the country’s greatest traditional musicians, and the well-known composer John Lunn, of Shetland and Downton Abbey fame, as part of our extended music programme.
Our creative workshops include editing and screenplay writing for the first time, and we have increased our outreach, with supported events in Cawdor, Tornagrain and rural East Nairnshire, and a larger schools programme than ever before.
The festival would not get off the ground without its funders and sponsors. Haventus has generously agreed to support us for three years, while Tornagrain has also been a key supporter this year. And we are very grateful to receive public funding, with Creative Scotland and EventScotland, part of VisitScotland’s Events Directorate, playing an essential part in ensuring we can continue to offer a fresh, accessible and creative programme of events, as the longest-standing and largest annual festival of its kind in the North and East of Scotland.
Audiences are bigger than ever, despite the challenges facing us all, and we are really looking forward to seeing them at what we expect to be a busy and exciting festival.
EventScotland is proud to be supporting Nairn Book and Arts Festival through our National Events Programme.
Events play an important role in our communities, helping bring social and economic benefits while also providing the chance to connect, enjoy and share memorable experiences.
It is wonderful to see this annual celebration of literature, art, music, drama and film has already broken its previous ticket sales record, delivering sustainable impacts for Nairn and reinforcing Scotland’s reputation as the perfect stage for events.
