Date: 6th to 19th May 2019

Here is s a new festival for Swindon, younger sibling of the Swindon Festival of Literature, which celebrated its twenty-fifth birthday last year. Now, the Swindon Spring Festival celebrates its first! The new Festival will continue to promote literature, good writing, speaking, and the exploration of ideas but now, with the help of numerous Swindon-based arts organisations and individuals, it will do so with the extra impetus of dance, drama, music, film, art, and circus skills.

Maintaining a tradition loved by Festival followers, we kick off at dawn on the first Bank Holiday Monday in May, seeing the sun rise over Swindon, with morning frolics, words, music, and movement, outdoors, on the high ridge in Lawn Woods. 

Then, for two weeks, in Swindon, we bring together writers, thinkers, speakers, actors, musicians, dancers, poets, filmmakers, storytellers, circus artistes, and all manner of performers.  

This is a festival that brings people of all ages and backgrounds together, in Swindon, to enjoy things well-thought, well-written, well-said, well-sung, and well-done. Writers meet readers; actors meet audiences; dancers and performers work with musicians and we all work together. We’ll talk, listen, watch, think, drink, and even take part. As a result, enjoyable, interesting, challenging, unpredictable, funny, and even memorable things will happen.

For a fortnight, in Swindon, there will be events daily, at midday, afternoon, teatime, and in the evening, carefully spaced and placed to enable you to attend as many as your own timetable and stamina allow. For the full at-a-glance Festival diary, see here. And then, mark your own diary, so that from 6th to 19th May you know where to be. Please read on, and come along.