Strong turnout at Stoke Newington Literary Festival, as founder warns over tough year ahead

Stoke Newington Literary Festival showed the public "properly re-committing to the whole festival experience”, founder and director Liz Vater has told The Bookseller. But in light of questions over corporate funding of events more widely, Vater warned that festivals could become more inaccessible if ticket prices needed to rise.

Vater reported a "strong return after the pandemic" for the north London festival last weekend (7th to 9th June) with boosted sales. "Weekend tickets sold out immediately and sales uptake on individual events was about twice as strong as the last couple of years,” Vater said.

This news will be welcome to festival organisers as they look to new funding models after Baillie Gifford’s sponsorship of event such as Hay, Edinburgh and Wigtown was pulled after activist group Fossil Free Books targeted the investment group.  Writing for The Bookseller, Fiona Razvi, director and co-founder of Wimbledon BookFest, warned that Baillie Gifford’s withdrawal from the arts scene was yet another blow to a fragile sector.

Stoke Newington Literary Festival has never taken corporate funding in its 14 years since starting, “relying on goodwill and community spirit” Vater said, though she was sympathetic with those who do. “It’s at odds with our ethos,” Vater added. “In saying that, we also had to accept that we weren’t going to take salaries and that certain things would be beyond us. Every year we effectively start from scratch so it’s made us very creative, resourceful and mindful that if we want to do our outreach work, every penny has to count.”

Vater said she felt like for the first time ’Stokey Fest’ bore the brunt of what she described as "generalised" discontent. “From the very beginning, we’ve actively encouraged constructive feedback as it helps us improve what we do," she said. "Previously, someone might say ’that didn’t work, how about this?’ and we’d have a conversation about how to do things better. [But] for the first time this year we felt as though we were a lightning rod for people’s generalised anger. Now it’s, ’I am outraged about this and you are wilfully trying to inconvenience me and while we’re on the subject I demand to know what your stance is on a totally unrelated issue that I am also furious about’.

“We understand why—the world is a bin fire—but when you’re trying to deal with a last-minute venue issue, do a deal on 250 folding chairs because supplier prices have shot through the roof, finish the risk assessments and run an outreach programme for disadvantaged kids that none of us is paid to do, you sometimes just think is it worth it?"

Vater added: "But then the festival happens and the community engages and we’ve got full houses of people learning about older women’s voices and how Empire and race impact someone’s identity and the chatter fades away for a bit.”

On the wider literary event landscape, Vater said “some [festivals] will inevitably fall by the wayside, and if others can’t find funding, prices will go up and they’ll be even more inaccessible to people on lower incomes”.

She added: “The bigger festivals will probably replace the bulk of the corporate money somehow but there isn’t a big pot of shiny clean gold and there certainly isn’t enough to go around. No-one’s optimistic about how quickly a new government will be able to have an impact on arts funding, so next year will be tough for many.”

Ultimately, she feels festivals “require a huge amount of good will and fairy dust to work”. 

She told The Bookseller: “No one starts a festival to make a fortune, not even the big corporate ones. We do it because we genuinely want to put some good stuff out there and encourage people to read a bit more than they usually might. It’s the easiest thing in the world to sit at a computer keyboard and trash something - much harder to put some effort where your mouth is."