Ali Smith to guest direct Brighton Festival

Ali Smith will be the guest director for the Brighton Festival 2015.

The annual multi-arts festival, which celebrates music, theatre, dance, circus, art, film and literature, will take place from 2nd to 24th May 2015. Smith is the seventh guest director, taking on the mantle from the 2014 guest director, choreographer, composer and performer Hofesh Shechter.

Andrew Comben, chief executive of Brighton Dome & Brighton Festival, said: “We are delighted to have welcomed Ali Smith on board as guest director for Brighton Festival 2015. At once deeply playful and deeply serious, Ali Smith brings a sensibility which perfectly mirrors the ambition of Brighton Festival – a willingness to take imaginative risks, defy genres, push boundaries and celebrate a love of art in all its infinite forms and varieties. I am certain that Ali Smith will bring a very special element to next year's Festival and I look forward to welcoming audiences to experience it in May.”

Smith said of her role and thinking behind the festival: “I'm a fan of the unexpected connection, the crossing places between the art forms, the place where they meet, open to each other and fuse into something more. The word festival comes from the place where the word for feast crosses into the word for joyful, happy, honouring, celebratory. The word Brighton, in the month of May: that means festival.”

The announcement comes a week after Smith was awarded Goldsmiths Prize for her novel How to be Both (Hamish Hamilton), which was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

The full programme details for the Brighton Festival 2015 will be available at the launch on 18th February 2015.