Dear Subscribers
Less than 2 weeks to go until the Ness Book Fest 2026! Have you got your tickets yet?
We are delighted to welcome our guests, Fiona J Mackenzie, Roger Croft, Billy Kay with Robyn Stapleton and Jim Miller to our 2026 programme. All our talks and performances promise to be interesting, thought provoking, uplifting and with a bit of humour thrown in as well.
This is the first time we have had an Authors book sign trailing. Take the chance to meet everyone, get a wee blether, take a selfie and have fun! There are a range of genres to select from, whether that be our children’s authors (Sam Steele, Yvonne Sloan, LD Lapinski, and Claire Walsh) or a bit of crime (Helen Forbes and RK Adams), queer fiction (Allan Radcliffe), poetry (Cáit O’Neill McCullagh), historical fiction (VJ Cooper) or wellbeing (Evelyn Newman), there’s something for everyone! See one or see them all! You will find your authors in every good book place in Inverness and a big thank you to our venues, Ablekids Press, Inverness Library, Leakey’s and Waterstones for hosting us.
The Schools Programme is also underway with the Readathon taking place on 2 Oct, the Writing Competition running until 20 Dec and as many author visits as we can manage to our local Inverness schools.
The theme for the writing competition this year is Transform. We chose this idea for a reason. Ness Book Fest is slowly fading away. Before the pandemic, this was a hugely popular event that was packed out over 4 days. Like many other in person activities, the festival struggled during the covid restrictions. When we came back, things were never the same and we have slowly dropped to 3 days and now we are a 2 day event.
So we have to change. There are many things we are no longer doing and new things we are trying out. We are keeping what we are ‘good’ at and phasing out those things that are not working so well. We are restructuring the way we work and our roles as part of Ness Book Fest which is still a work in process.
We are now focusing on 3 main areas.
Our audience. Our authors. Our schools.
We have ideas for our authors and our schools. We need to find better ways to engage with our audiences and that is still also a work in progress. We are trying to go for the phoenix rising from the ashes rather than a Frankenstein monster idea! How are we going to do this? We haven’t quite ironed that out yet but right now we hope to find out more by talking with our audiences at our events. The question is how can we transform into something that works much better.
But ultimately we need time. Time to create an event that more of you find interesting and engaging. Time to make Ness Book Fest into a stable and sustainable form. Something that you want to come along to. Too often we have heard that there was nothing that ‘floats my boat’ and that is a fair comment. But this year we would ask you to support just even 1 event. We have 742 Subscribers. Everyone signed up for a reason. If everyone came to just 1 event, we could survive. Come to two events, and we might even live again. Take a friend with you, and oh my goodness, we might even thrive. So this year we are asking you kindly to show your support, not just for us, but also our lovely, fantastic and brilliant authors by coming along and taking a seat. Tickets are of course free. The website will ask for a donation, but it’s optional. Check out the programme page for all our events and the box office links.
Thank you kindly
Ness Book Fest Team 2026
