Bradford Literature Festival (BLF) is delighted to announce a new international partnership with Humaniti International, a global non-profit humanitarian organisation providing emergency relief, healthcare, food security, water access and orphan care to vulnerable populations worldwide.
2026 was a tremendous year for BLF, as the festival celebrated its 12th edition with record-breaking attendance numbers of 201,674 visitors across ten days. Humaniti International partnered on a number of the events, including headliner Prue Leith’s conversation with Peg Alexander, the annual Rumi Lecture, delivered by Professor Jawid Mojaddedi, and a highlight debate on democracy and freedom with Former South African Ambassador to the United States Ebrahim Rasool, podcaster and journalist Myriam François and former First Minister of Scotland Humza Yousaf.
Founded to deliver aid irrespective of race or religion, Humaniti International’s core initiatives include setting up mobile clinics, delivering medicine and providing life-saving surgeries; building solar wells and delivering clean drinking water; distributing hot meals and essential supplies in crisis zones, and financial assistance. As Bradford Literature Festival continues to evolve and grow, this partnership perfectly aligns with the festival’s vision and future ambitions, and signals a contrinued commitment to fostering creativity, inclusion, and social impact.
Further events supported by Humaniti International at the 2026 festival included ‘Beyond Time’, in which Fawad Kalsi, Jared Shuri and CERN physicist Professor Akram Khan explored some of humanity’s oldest and most profound questions: the nature of consciousness, the limits of perception and the relationship between reality, uncertainty and human experience. Humaniti International also supported the ‘Empire After Empire’ event, in which Vince Cable spoke with Dr Nafja Sabbah Al-Kuwari and Professor Paul Rogers about how different empires have risen and fallen throughout history, exploring the psychology of decline and new contemporary definitions of empire.
Commenting on the 2026 festival, Founder and Artistic Director Syima Aslam said: “Culture is not a luxury. It is a necessity. Bradford Literature Festival began with a simple idea: that a literature festival in this city should be more than a series of events. It should be a place of encounter. A place of ambition. A place where people who are too often spoken about could speak for themselves. A place where stories that had lived for generations in families, in communities, in music, in poetry, in memory, and in silence, could be brought into the centre of cultural life. We are very purposefully a literature festival, even though our programme is across arts, music, theatre, film and visual art. We are a literature festival because literature is language, imagination, memory, argument, beauty and truth. Literature is how we understand ourselves, and how we begin to understand each other.”
Following the success of 2026, the festival has announced that it will take place between Friday 11th June – Sunday 20th June in 2027, with further details to follow.
For updates on the 2027 programme, please visit: www.bradfordlitfest.co.uk.