PAST FESTIVALS
Each year’s festival has its own character, with a mix of thematic strands woven together. A rich creative stimulus comes from Scotland’s themed years, such as the Year of Young People and the Year of Coasts and Waters. Other developments have included Foraging Fortnight.
Special visitors have shaped the programme, such as Jane Goodall, and Nobel laureates Peter Higgs and Sir Paul Nurse. There have also been collaborations with organisations and community groups on topics ranging from astronomy to renewable energy.
In 2018 we had the Moon in Stromness, and in 2023 the Sun came to St Magnus Cathedral.
You can see from the picture from each year how varied the programme is, and our thanks go to so many people and groups for the imagination and energy they have put in to it.
Each year’s festival has its own character, with a mix of thematic strands woven together. A rich creative stimulus comes from Scotland’s themed years, such as the Year of Young People and the Year of Coasts and Waters. Other developments have included Foraging Fortnight.
Special visitors have shaped the programme, such as Jane Goodall, and Nobel laureates Peter Higgs and Sir Paul Nurse. There have also been collaborations with organisations and community groups on topics ranging from astronomy to renewable energy.
In 2018 we had the Moon in Stromness, and in 2023 the Sun came to St Magnus Cathedral.
You can see from the picture from each year how varied the programme is, and our thanks go to so many people and groups for the imagination and energy they have put in to it.
OISF 2025 EVENTS
We celebrated the centenary of quantum theory, born on the North Sea island of Helgoland, and welcomed the director of the island’s museum to tell the story, amidst music from the time. We heard about ancient auks and albatrosses and we plunged into the immensity of geological time, from the mountains of Caithness to the Stromness granite, once an island in a great lake. We heard of pioneers of ocean energy and met recyclers of ocean plastic. We saw a Norse cloak from Berneray and we found out how to cook Icelandic lamb. We learned of the ancient woods in Sanday which today are covered by the sea, and heard how the island’s knitters reached the world of international fashion.
OISF 2024 EVENTS
This was the year when we went swimming with gravitational waves and told the story of the making of the Pentland Firth, with a filmed visit to Stroma. We went on screen to Eynhallow as well, to mark the anniversary of the long study of fulmars on the island. It was an anniversary too for Kirkwall’s mains electricity and for the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. We walked at the Ness of Brodgar following the close of the excavations and learned about some of this year’s remarkable finds. We featured the science of superheroes and also the quest for genetic heroes with distinctive traits against particular diseases; and we learned about the power of music for people living with dementia.
OISF 2023 EVENTS
This was the year of the SUN! The installation was created by an artist and a solar physicist, with images of the actual sun projected on its surface, with the swirl and fire of solar storms. It blazed out through St Magnus Cathedral, and thousands of people came to see. We had insights on the physics of the Sun and the nuclear fusion that powers it, and we heard about the 19th-century scientist of Orcadian descent who made a vital link for the understanding of the Northern Lights. We had a visit from a great science communicator from Kansas – who brought a legendary western musical group, and together we told stories of science and the Old West.
OISF 2022 EVENTS
We go back in time to the forming of Orkney’s rocks from the sediments in Lake Orcadie, and we look ahead to routes to a sustainable future. There are stories of voyages in polar waters and ships on the salt roads. There are Cathedral concerts, a candlelight lecture, and papermaking by the sea.
OISF 2021 EVENTS
For this 31st Festival we continue our adventure online, with the opportunity for everyone who has a web connection to access events. The Year of Coasts and Waters runs through the programme, with stories of tidal turbines and Arctic journeys, shore life and sea-cliffs, and the sights and sounds of the island of Swona with its seals and shipwreck stories. Looking at the sea and its transformations, hearing the music of northern composers along the old sea-routes, watching the waves break on the Rackwick beach. Hearing of the days of the Hudson’s Bay Company, seeing Greenland and its ice, meeting researchers in a Stromness harbour setting.
OISF 2020 EVENTS
This 30th Festival is a new adventure for us as we deliver online, with a big team of helpers joining in to make it possible. The Year of Coasts and Waters runs through the programme, with stories of tidal turbines and Arctic journeys, shipbuilding and shipwrecks, whale songs and selkie stories, and North Ronaldsay’s seaweed-eating sheep. Foraging Fortnight gives us an additional outdoor dimension, with outings to Hoy and Graemsay, and walks along parts of the St Magnus Way. Topics range from superconductivity to spaceports, ocean plastic to atmospheric pollution, Orkney’s Norse genetic links to the analysis of the finds from the Ness of Brodgar excavation.
OISF 2019 EVENTS
Orkney International Science Festival this year will have an added outdoor dimension as it joins forces with a new Foraging Fortnight being established in Scotland. The Festival’s programme will be enhanced by a range of new events, including shore outings and papermaking from natural materials. There will be talks on wild food in Scandinavia, a look at the potential of seaweed for health and nutrition, and an evening of foraged food from the Neolithic.
OISF 2018 EVENTS
The Year of Young People 2018 provide the opportunity for so much, not only in varied events but also in the development of a new look for the Festival with the team of young people who emerged to chair and introduce all the events. One of the highlights was Nobel Laureate Sir Paul Nurse (2001, Physiology/Medicine) in conversation with Dave Gray of BBC Radio Orkney. Then there was the music, with the St Andrews New Music Ensemble putting on three concerts and musicians from Ireland as well, with local musicians and actors, there was a rich mix of music and dramatised lectures.
OISF 2017 EVENTS
It was Scotland’s year of History, Heritage and Archaeology, and there were certainly plenty of anniversaries to commemorate. There were 50 years since the start of Loganair’s North Isles air service, and 50 years since the death of the Orkney shell expert and poet Robert Rendall. One of the highlights was Prof. Peter Higgs In Conversation with his former mathematical physics student Dennis Canavan. The Nobel laureate looked back at the events that had shaped his career and led to the prediction and discovery of the Higgs boson.
OISF 2016 EVENTS
The sea surged through the Festival, in a year when the world looked back a century to the battle of Jutland and forward to the potential of tidal power. Marty Jopson of The One Show got the Festival off to a flying start, followed next day by a highly dynamic show on the science of everyday life. Each of the seven days was packed with events and activities, with topics from the Northern Lights to the origin of comets, from ancient humans to modern diet, from waves to whisky-making, from the mathematics of the Neolithic to the physics of golf.
OISF 2015 EVENTS
Nobel laureate Peter Higgs was in conversation with fellow physicist Frank Close, the venue the impressive new Orkney Theatre in Kirkwall Grammar School. The school also hosted the exhibition From Maxwell to Higgs, brought north by a team from Edinburgh University.
OISF 2014 EVENTS
Vistas of earth, sea and sky opened up in 2014, with a look into Orkney’s geological past as a great lake in Devonian times, and then a look further back in time to the origins of the universe and of life itself with one of the great astrophysicists of our time, Prof. Chandra Wickramasinghe.
OISF 2013 EVENTS
Exploration was to the fore in 2013, the bicentenary of the birth of the great Arctic explorer John Rae. The Festival was opened by the widely-travelled documentary film-maker Alan Ereira, who showed his new film, made with Kogi people of Colombia, opening up a dialogue with western science.
OISF 2011 EVENTS
In the Year of Scotland’s Islands, the Festival featured events across Orkney from an astronomy weekend in North Ronaldsay to an evening of underwater archaeology in the Hoy Kirk. It was opened by an islander – the Scottish science fiction writer Ken MacLeod who comes from the Western Isles.