This year we’ll highlight several parts of Orkney not often viewed – among them Swona, amidst the swirl of the Pentland Firth’s tides, and the glens of Hoy with panoramic views from the top of the Cuilags. And we will visit Graemsay, to see the drone arriving with the mail from Stromness and hear stories of the great days of the island’s yoles for cargo and passengers.

We’ll get the latest news from the Ness of Brodgar in the wake of this summer’s special new short dig, and with the work on the many finds continuing. We’ll learn about fresh interest in the old Norn language of Orkney and Shetland – and have an opportunity to sing it as well,

We’ll also hear about the search for the unseen universe of dark matter and dark energy and see spectacular images from deep space taken by the Euclid space telescope. We’ll get the latest news of a revolutionary microscope able to show the movements within a living cell, and we’ll hear about a groundbreaking new approach to bring together the quantum universe with our everyday world of gravity.

We’ll meet people who are used to taking on challenges, among them a Paralympic gold medallist who has ascended El Capitan and crossed Antarctica, and a traveller from Orkney who has been to the top of all Scotland’s Munros. We’ll also hear of a Latin teacher at Stromness Academy who was a wartime codebreaker in the Far East.

And we’ll hear of a hard time in the life of the great Arctic explorer John Rae, when he came back to the world of Victorian Britain and found the establishment closing ranks against him in response to his chilling news of the end of the Franklin expedition. It was a survey for a northern telegraph route that started him back into action, and that gives us an opportunity to tell the story with some music from Nordic lands. We will find out too about the power of imagination, the persistence of memory, and the art of listening – and much much more.

We hope you can join us on the journey!

There is also regular news in our social media – on Facebook and Instagram.

In addition, our online magazine of science and exploration, Frontiers, is developing into a richly varied source of stories. It’s full of features about Orkney – its wildlife and environment, its history and archaeology, its islands and people; and we have a varied range of contributing writers, artists and photographers.

We now have two Landscapes websites, one for Orkney Landscapes and one for Caithness Landscapes, with each one a comprehensive resource for local people and visitors alike – for schools and students, teachers and researchers, and for everyone who likes to find out more about the forces that have moulded the landscapes around us today. There are vistas of sea-cliffs and inland hills, the story of the ancient Lake Orcadie of Devonian times and the ripple-marks and mudcracks from it that we can see today, and the fishes that swam in it and are now fossils.

And there’s more that you can watch from home on our YouTube channel. There are now more than 300 videos to enjoy, with many talks and also music and films. We will be adding to them gradually with recordings from this year’s festival, with talks on many subjects, and films and music too, some of it specially written or recorded.

On this website you can also find more about our background and highlights of past festivals, and see more of Orkney itself. You can also look back to descriptions of this year’s events on the Programme page.

The need for all communities to produce more of their own food and drink is something that we will continue to highlight. There is a lot of information about how to grow food, how to improve the soil, how to forage food for added nutrition and wellbeing in our new Sufficient Orkney Food website.

And if you want to give us a boost to keep up with all the challenges of delivering the Festival, there is a Donate button at the foot of this page, and your help will be warmly appreciated!

We are also sending out Festival updates in several issues of a newsletter. You can download the latest one here and also join the mailing list.