Wigtown Book Festival organisers hope volunteer roles bring the community together
The 10-day event generates over £4 million for the local economy.
Last updated 5th Jun 2025
As preparations for this year’s Wigtown Book Festival get underway, organisers are looking for volunteers to help deliver the 10-day literacy event.
There are lots of roles up for grabs, ranging from everything behind the scenes to being in the public eye.
Every year, this festival attracts thousands of visitors to Scotland’s National Book Town, boosting the local economy by more than £4 million.
Although it doesn’t begin until the last week of September, Director Anne Barclay is keen to start assigning roles.
Good opportunity to unite the community with visitors
She hopes that this will be a good opportunity to bring the community together to deliver this event:
“A key aspect of the festival has always been its unique sense of place, and I think it’s really important for us that the community are involved in the delivery of the festival because they help to create that. People love meeting people from the local community or people who have fallen in love with the place.”
Volunteer roles
“There are all sorts of volunteer roles up for grabs and lots of ways to get involved with the festival, ranging from working in the box office and selling tickets, to helping set up venues, programme distributions, driving authors and guests to and from airports and stations, hosting venues, helping at information points – all sorts of things hopefully tailored to the skills of the volunteers and also to the amount of time they can spare.
“Some people might volunteer for anything from one hour to forty or fifty hours, and it really all depends on what suits you.”
Importance of volunteers
“The festival quite simply couldn’t take place without our volunteers. Their dedication of more than 2,000 hours across the ten days would be impossible to replace.”
“The region without the festival would miss out on the opportunity to hear world-class writers and thinkers right here on our doorstep, and ultimately, we would miss out on the economic benefit that the festival brings, which is worth around £4.3 million to the region’s economy.”