Islay Book Festival is a small arts charity and our community festival is run on a not-for-profit basis. Any fundraising that we do, and all proceeds from ticket sales, goes towards the planning and delivery of the festival, which is run entirely by volunteers. We would be hugely grateful for any support you might be able to offer us towards the ongoing development of our festival.

2019 will be our 13th festival and we continue to go from strength to strength since we first set up in 2006. 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 top quality line-up! We hope to continue to offer variety through our programme and to help strengthen Islay's local cultural scene.

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.

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 consider helping us out. 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 2019, 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.