Our curator of storytelling John Row and artistic director of the Marrakech International Storytelling Festival, is a veteran of the U.K. festival scene and a familiar figure at Glastonbury Festival Kidz Field and Cambridge Folk Festival, where he has been performing for nearly thirty years.

He cut his teeth as a stage performer at the Ipswich Arts Theatre on free Monday night shows where his late wife Rose, was a theatre electrician and with Nick Toczeck in the poetry and music review Stereo Graffiti in the 70’s and as an open air performer in the East Anglian  Albion Fairs in the 80’s. He added storytelling to his bow as the eighties drew to a close and was immediately drawn into a world of magic and wonder. He has shared that world in a mish mash of settings from prisons ( he was the first storyteller in residence in a British prison) to international schools across the world. His annual visits to Vienna in the first  decade of this century saw him tell stories to thousands of Kindergarten children as they struggled to come to grips with English as an additional language. A crowd at the Algiers Book Fair listened, enthralled, to him speaking in what was for some their fourth language and he has become a favourite in the schools near Colibita in Transylvania where he has a house he uses as a writing retreat.

He has told stories from Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei in the east to Lapland in the north, Shajah in the middle east, Texas, North Africa and across Europe.

During the pandemic he helped develop this virtual platform for storytelling, then as the world opened up he became the artistic director of The Marrakech International Storytelling Festival as well as returning to touring festivals and schools in the U.K. and Romania including festivals in Arad and Oradea.

Contact him at bookings@johnrow.com

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