2018 will be the 11th Islay Book Festival. We have gone from strength to strength since we first set up in 2006 and since then we have hosted a great variety of authors, poets, storytellers and more, many of them world famous, who have each brought a range of inspirational events to our community and its many visitors! And we hope there will be many more festivals to come.

But we need your help. Fundraising for the festival, and for the arts in general, has become increasingly difficult every year. This year we have a great programme planned, with a bigger schools programme and increased community outreach. We're also trying to introduce a regular Gaelic feature to our annual programme, and to give a greater platform to local authors and themes of local relevance. We hope to continue to offer variety through our programme and this year we also want to go a step further and bring a visual art exhibition to Islay to tie in with the festival.

However, running a festival is not cheap. We make sure we pay our authors, and so each session on the programme costs us £175 per author. Due to our location, each author's travel will cost £250 on average. And it's £75 per night to accommodate an author, with most of them needing to stay up to three nights due to travel arrangements. So each of our authors can easily cost £800-900 to bring to Islay. So, as you can imagine, this all adds up and with venue, equipment, and catering costs to take into account too, plus additional running costs, it means our small charity needs to raise a good amount of funds each year in order to deliver the festival to our local community and its many visitors.

This year, although we're pleased to have secured some funding and a number of sponsorship deals, we are struggling to raise as much as we need to in order to fund not just this year's festival, but also to ensure its continued existence. If we don't secure a reasonable level of funding this year we will have used up most of our charity's reserve funds, which will put our festival's future in doubt.

So please, please consider helping us out. Our festival means so much to so many people. Anything you can give to help us offset some of our expenses this year will enable us to deliver a varied and fun-filled festival in 2018, with the multitude of benefits that it brings, and will also give us a much firmer starting point for planning future festivals.

With all our heartfelt thanks from the Islay Book Festival team.