Primadonna Book Festival 'confident' event will go ahead despite council’s proposed cuts to funding 

Catherine Mayer, the co-founder of Primadonna Festival, says she is “confident this year’s festival will go ahead” despite a proposed 100% cut to Suffolk county council’s cultural budget.

The council revealed its proposed budget on Wednesday (3rd January). The Guardian reported that the council planned to cut £500,000 to art and museum sector organisations from April 2025.

A shared statement from local organisations affected by the decision, including Primadonna Festival, as well as DanceEast, Eastern Angles theatre company, First Light festival, the New Wolsey theatre, Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds and Suffolk Artlink, said the cut would make an “extremely modest difference” to the council’s overall finances but have a “huge impact” on communities across the county.

Their statement continued: “The ‘cost’ to our county will be so much more significant. Collectively, our organisations support 24,493 children and young people and 76,516 vulnerable people through our community engagement work. We also provide permanent employment for 154 staff, and project or contract employment for a further 499 staff. Suffolk-wide, the culture sector plays an important part in providing employment for local people, with almost 6,985 jobs being supported by the sector.”

This year’s Primadonna Festival will take place between 26th and 28th July 2024. The festival hopes to give prominence to women, Black and Asian artists, the LGBTQIA+ community, working class and disabled people. Primadonna has a vision “to change the way books and publishing work, by spotlighting voices from the margins and offering money-can’t-buy opportunities for you to come and get advice for your own writing".

Mayer told The Bookseller: “We are grateful to Suffolk for their support to date, and confident that this year’s festival will go ahead. Local councils, like the wider population, are being faced with impossible choices because of more than a decade of austerity, which has increased demand for services such as social care and homelessness support, a situation compounded by the impacts of the pandemic and the cost of living crisis. Festivals such as Primadonna not only create jobs and generate economic activity, but something else vital in these circumstances – joy – which is why we will do our utmost to keep going.”

To assist with the transition, Suffolk County Council said that £528,000 of Covid-19 recovery money will be made available to arts organisations for the year 2024-25.

The council’s plans will be presented in full details to its scrutiny committee on 11th January.