The Best Storytelling Festivals in the World

In 1996, a Spanish novelist looked at a market square in Marrakech and realized there was no legal instrument on earth that could protect what happened there. The buildings could be listed. The storytellers standing in the middle of them could not. What he did about that changed how the world defines heritage, and it started with a plan to build a car park.

The square that forced a new idea

Jemaa el-Fna sits in the medina of Marrakech and has functioned as a market and gathering place since the Almoravids founded the city in 1062. Storytellers, acrobats, Berber and Arab musicians, Gnaoua groups, snake charmers and fortune tellers work there daily, each drawing a halqa, an Arabic word meaning circle. The circle is the venue. A teller arrives, begins, and the audience assembles around them out of the crowd.

Juan Goytisolo, a Spanish writer who has lived part of his life in the medina, learned in the mid-1990s that the local authorities intended to put a glass-fronted tower block and an underground car park beside the square. He understood what that would do to the trade of a man who needs a crowd and open ground, and he asked UNESCO to declare the square oral heritage of humanity.

No such category existed.

Every intangible heritage listing in the world descends from an argument about storytellers in a Moroccan square. Goytisolo’s description of the place, given at the opening meeting for the new initiative, is the best summary of why it was worth the trouble: the spectacle repeats every day, and every day it is different.

Recognition has not solved everything. The geographer Thomas Schmitt, who has studied the square closely, found that storytelling there is being pushed aside by musical acts that draw younger audiences, and that a UNESCO listing brings commercial pressure alongside protection. Naming a living practice as heritage does not freeze it, and it can quietly change what it is.

Jonesborough, Tennessee: sixty people and a hay wagon

The other founding story of the modern festival movement is smaller and stranger. In 1973 a high school journalism teacher named Jimmy Neil Smith was driving with a carload of students when Jerry Clower came on the radio, telling a tale about raccoon hunting in Mississippi. Smith decided his town should hold a festival for that.

The Center in Jonesborough was the first facility in the world built solely for storytelling, and it runs a teller-in-residence season from spring through autumn, so the town has live storytelling most of the year rather than one weekend of it.

Edinburgh: the largest of them

The Scottish International Storytelling Festival began in 1989 and now describes itself as the world’s largest celebration of the form, with programmes running past a hundred events. It is built on the ceilidh tradition, the Scottish house gathering, and it is deliberately scheduled for late October so that it ends at Halloween and Samhuinn, when the dark half of the year begins.

Its home, the Scottish Storytelling Centre on the Royal Mile, is the only purpose-built storytelling venue in the United Kingdom. Recent programmes have brought tellers from Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Germany, India and Ireland, alongside a French-Cameroonian artist working in the griot tradition of West Africa.

Cape Clear: eight miles offshore

Ireland’s Cape Clear Island International Storytelling Festival takes the opposite approach to scale. The island lies eight miles off the coast of West Cork, reachable by ferry, and the festival has run for over three decades in a place where the audience cannot easily leave and the storytellers cannot easily be replaced.

Smallness is the design. An island festival cannot become a stadium event, which means the form stays close to what it was: a person talking, in a room, to people who can see their face.

Beyond the English-speaking circuit

The four above are the ones usually named in English. They are not the biggest, the oldest, or the most interesting.

Mornings at Kathakar are for children, evenings for everyone. The dedication tells you something about what the founders think storytelling is for: the man it honors spent his life making written words reachable by people who could not see them.

The Spanish-speaking world calls them cuenteros

There is an entire festival circuit conducted in Spanish that rarely appears on English lists at all.

Mexico’s Festival Internacional de Narración Oral Cuéntalee has run for more than thirty-six years, staged partly in the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City and organized through the national literature body. It gathers narradores orales from Argentina, Colombia, Cuba, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Panama, Peru, Jamaica, Brazil, Spain, France and the Republic of the Congo.

In 2025, under the theme Voces que vienen de lejos, voices that come from far away, the festival opened a space for oral narration in Indigenous languages for the first time in its history. Elizabeth Márquez, from San Miguel Tenango in the sierra of Puebla, performed her poems in Nahuatl and Spanish.

Thirty-six years of celebrating oral tradition before the first performance in an Indigenous language of the country it is held in. The organizers said the point was to open the festival to people who had not had access to it, which was a candid admission.

The Guadalajara marathon deserves the attention. Stories run continuously for an entire weekend, told by whoever is next, with well over a thousand participants in recent years. Anyone can take a turn, which makes it the closest thing on this list to how storytelling actually worked before anyone thought to sell tickets.

Armando Trejo, who has directed the Mexican festival, traces the modern narrador oral back through a specific lineage: the tribal storyteller, the traveling minstrel, the shaman, the Arab fabulist, the community teller, and the grandparent. That is a more accurate family tree than most English accounts offer, which tend to begin with Homer and skip the rest of the planet.

The smallest form: a room, every week, for decades

Festivals are annual. The harder and rarer thing is the weekly circle that never stops, and the best documented example has been running in Toronto since 1978.

Its origin was an accident. Dan Yashinsky had persuaded the owners of Gaffer’s Café in Kensington Market to let him tell stories on Friday nights between the musicians’ sets. One evening the musicians did not turn up, and he was pushed onstage to cover the whole night alone. It went well enough that it kept happening.

What grew out of it matters as much as the evening itself. In the spring of 1979 Yashinsky, together with Celia Lottridge, Lorne Brown, Bob Barton, Alice Kane, Joan Bodger and Rosemary Allison, founded both the Toronto Storytelling Festival and the Storytellers School of Toronto. A festival, a school, and a weekly open mic, all three still running, all traceable to a night when the band canceled.

Yashinsky later collected around fifty stories from those Fridays into Tales for an Unknown City, which won a Toronto Book Award, and he received the Jane Jacobs Prize in 1999 for his contribution to the city’s cultural life.

That is the whole argument for the small form. Nobody hitchhikes across a province for a broadcast. One of the current hosts, asked why it persists, said simply that people are hungry for connection.

What festivals are actually for

Set them side by side and a pattern appears. Jemaa el-Fna is a working tradition that needed defending. Jonesborough is a revival built from almost nothing. Edinburgh is an institution with a permanent building. Cape Clear refuses to grow. Kathakar was founded to reach children who would otherwise never hear a professional teller. Guadalajara hands the microphone onward and does not stop. Toronto proves the form survives at the smallest possible scale, one room and one evening a week, for nearly fifty years.

All four exist because the same thing keeps happening: a practice that requires people to gather in one place is the first casualty of every technology that lets them stay home. Radio emptied the Damascus cafés. Television finished the job. The festivals are an answer to that, and their common feature is that attendance is the whole point. You cannot stream a halqa. The circle only forms if you stand in it.

How this applies to you

• Go once. Most of these run annually in October, and most have family programmes that are cheaper and quieter than the main events.
• Sit near the front. The form depends on the teller seeing the audience react, and the back of a tent is a different experience from the third row.
• Take a child to a live telling before they decide books are homework. A person telling a story without a screen is genuinely strange to a child raised on video, and strange is memorable.
• Find the weekly one instead. Open storytelling circles are cheaper, smaller, and more welcoming than festivals, and most cities have one if you look.
• Make a small one. A room, a time, and somebody willing to go first. Everything above began at that size, and one of them began because a band failed to show up.

Jonesborough had sixty people and a farm wagon. Fifty years later a town of five thousand calls itself the storytelling capital of the world, and a square in Marrakech rewrote an international convention. Neither started with a budget.