The Sorrento Writers Festival Story

The Sorrento Writers Festival is a not-for-profit cultural and community organisation festival that brings year-round literary events, discussions and talks to Sorrento and the wider Mornington Peninsula and Melbourne community. 

The inaugural Festival was held in April 2023 with 94 events and 144 speakers. In 2024 we hosted 135 events and 190 speakers. More than 6000 people came to the Festival last April. In 2025,  we hope to increase this number as word spreads and more friends tell their friends. 

Our Festival has a long-term commitment to improve literacy, enhance learning and provide a safe, stimulating and mutually-respectful environment in which to discuss ideas. We want more children reading books. We want them to experience the joys of storytelling and the potential of their imaginations. We want older folk to be excited and engaged. 

The Festival celebrates Sorrento’s deep First Nations history, its European settler influence, and its contemporary role as one of Victoria’s most beautiful coastal villages.  

History will always be a pillar of our Festival. So, too, journalism. Some of Australia’s greatest writing appears in her newspapers and magazines and we honor those practitioners who defy tight deadlines, lack of resources, impossible pressures and diminishing outlets so they can tell us the news.  

Fiction and non-fiction writers, children’s authors and illustrators, biographers, essayists, musicians and performers – these artists are part of Australian literature’s story, and they will always underpin our mission to bring readers and writers together. Without their storytelling, there would be no national culture nor identity. 

Next April will be our third Festival. In such a short time, Sorrento Writers Festival has become Victoria’s biggest literary event with a national reputation for creating joy, highlighting Australian writing and nurturing our local publishing ecology. We hope you’ll join us in what is truly a community-inspired phenomenon.