ONCE again, Matt Holland and his team have done Swindon proud.

This year’s Swindon Festival of Literature was the 22nd, and comfortably vies for the accolade of best yet.

When the festival began in the early 1990s, Swindon was a different place — as was the world in many ways.

Throughout the local and global changes of the intervening years, the festival has gone from strength to strength; in all that time not a single one has left visitors anything other than satisfied.

There have been festivals with large numbers of celebrity authors, festivals focused on other aspects of literature and — notably in more recent years — festivals which have struck a perfect balance between the two strategies.

What the organisers have never lost track of, however, is the importance of giving members of the public a chance to participate, whether it be by taking part in a workshop, questioning an author or showing off their own efforts at an event such as the ever-popular Slam.

When the first festival was in the planning stage, there were naysayers who predicted it would not be a success, that literature festivals were for the likes of Cheltenham and Hay, and that Swindon risked disaster, humiliation and ridicule if it attempted to muscle in on this unknown territory.

Some of those naysayers were motivated by sincere caution and concern and others by gleeful anticipation of calamity, but all have long since been resoundingly proved wrong.

Swindon already had a proud engineering and technological tradition, but thanks to the festival of literature and other events inspired by it, Swindon can now credit itself a cultural venue.

The organisers, and the tireless Matt Holland most of all, deserve our enduring gratitude.