A Stern Gaze

A Triumphant Filey Literature Festival 2025

Well, that’s it. The Final page has been turned on the sun-soaked 2025 Filey Literature Festival. Our best yet? With 1,000 visitors, packed houses and an eclectic range of speakers, it is fair to say that we have lived up to our strap line: ‘coastal, communal and crackers’.

Our Saturday evening headliner, Stuart Hillard, star of Channel 4’s Great British Sewing Bee. Photo: Ron Ella.

The festival is utterly reliant on its tiny band of volunteers, the local businesses who support individual acts and a handful of small grants from various Filey-based groups. We receive no significant or national funding. We are fortunate to receive grants from Filey Town Council, North Yorkshire Council and Filey Trade and Tourism Association, they are used in their entirety to attract a range of quality speakers and secure accommodation for those coming from further afield. We always ensure that our speakers find a bed for the night in a Filey guest house, thereby recycling the grant money within the town.

The communal nature of the festival was epitomised when I arrived at Filey railway station to give my talk in the station cafe, and saw two of our speakers on the platforms waiting for their respective trains back to Scarborough and Hull. Similarly, we take events into local businesses, this year speakers were hosted by a trio of small businesses: The Coffee Shed, Saucy Seagull and Curlew Gelato Lounge. They threw open their doors to us, and we brought full houses to each and everyone. Of course, the majority of our events are held at the Evron Centre, the staff employed by NYC were a joy to work with and managed to solve every issue we threw at them. We tip our collective hats in their direction.

Being at Filey, we cannot ignore the sea. Our opening event at the White Lodge Hotel, also dipped its toe into the North Sea, with a fabulously anarchic talk about the history of women’s swimwear. The following evening it was a pleasure to work with the Yorkshire Coast 1779 group and Filey Sea Cadets. The event at the Sea Cadets Hall (which featured the former director of the National Maritime Museum Roger Knight), was one of the highlights of the festival.

We have no paid staff, in some respects it is very much back of a beer mat stuff, but somehow we manage to bring a vast variety of speakers and authors to our little seaside town. More importantly, the feedback we receive from our speakers and visitors is overwhelmingly positive. They seem to love the friendly, laid back and slightly bonkers vibe.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who supported us in 2025, whether you were an attendee, speaker, volunteer or staff member at one of the venues. Thank you for embracing our festival, with a following wind we will be back for 2026. We might even be doing something Brontë related this autumn, there might even be a bus trip around a prehistoric lake, watch this space!

Catherine Welch’s Wreck Walk gets underway on Coble Landing. Photo Ron Ella.

We leave the last word to Dean Wilson, who might well be Withernsea’s second best poet, but last weekend he was Filey’s best poet!

Let’s dance like Lorca

Let’s dance like Dali

Let’s dance like Old Mother Hubbard

and Old Mother Riley

Let’s dance like Katy

Let’s dance like Miley

Let’s dance like Stephen King

and the Mayor of Filey