Liverpool Arab Arts Festival returns with a city-wide meditation on 'home'

Liverpool Arab Arts Festival is back from 17 to 26 July 2026, bringing 10 days of music, performance, visual art, literature and film to venues across the city. Now in its 24th year, the festival continues its long-running mission to platform artists from across the Arab region and its diaspora, while celebrating Liverpool’s identity as an outward-looking city shaped by culture, creativity and community.

This year’s theme is HOME - a word that can mean place, memory, family, movement, belonging, or sometimes all of those things at once. Across the programme, artists and audiences will be invited to think about what home holds, what it leaves behind, and how it shifts through geography, relationships and experience.

Among the first events announced is the world premiere of Album 2! from Tamsin Elliott and Tarek Elazhary, coming to the Philharmonic Music Room on Friday 24 July. The pair’s collaboration brings together Egyptian Maqam and English folk traditions, creating a sound that moves between cultures, histories and musical forms. Tickets for that event are already on sale.

The festival will close, as ever, with the much-loved LAAF Family Day on Sunday 26 July at the Palm House in Sefton Park. Free to attend, it promises an afternoon of live music, performance, food, craft, calligraphy, dance, storytelling and workshops, with plenty for children and families to get involved in.

There’s also a call-out for traders to be part of Family Day, with organisers especially keen to hear from authentic Arab and Middle Eastern food traders, though applications are open more widely to those whose work fits the spirit of the event.

Founded in 1998, Liverpool Arab Arts Festival remains the UK’s longest-running annual festival of Arab arts and culture. Over the years it has grown into a major platform for Arab artists locally, nationally and internationally, while continuing to create space in the city for cultural exchange, connection and conversation.

Further events will be announced in due course, with tickets released via the festival website as the full programme lands.

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