This 20th birthday celebration is not only about looking back. We launch the festival with a celebration of young poets of the future. A showcase of winners and former winners of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award, featuring Jonathan Stone, Jasmine Simms, Charlotte Higgins and Ledbury’s Young Poet in Residence Flora de Falbe….
Community Hall Anniversary Anthology Showcase Hear a selection of poems from poets who have read at Ledbury since the Festival started, all of whom feature in Hwaet!, a Festival anthology of over 190 poets from all over the world. Celebrating 20 years of Ledbury, this event is hosted by Mark Fisher. The evening features a…
Burgage Hall We Are All from Somewhere Else: Writing Between World and Identity. Ruth Padel and Daljit Nagra both write on an edge between myth and experience; between different cultures and geographies. Daljit’s debut collection Look we are coming to Dover gave voice to new cultural identities formed by immigration, while his recent Ramayana found…
Burgage Hall Much-loved poet Fleur Adcock makes a welcome return to Ledbury. Her poems are remarkable for their wry wit, conversational tone and psychological insight, unmasking the deceptions of love or unravelling family lives. She read from her latest collection The Land Ballot. Her migrant grandparents acquired a plot of bush in New Zealand’s North…
Burgage Hall Versopolis is a platform that unites 13 European Festivals to promote and translate their most exciting new poets. André Rudolph (Germany), Goran Colakhodžic (Croatia), Monica Aasprong (Norway), Samantha Barendson (France) and Judith Nika Pfeifer (Austria) share the stage with four of the UK poets: Jonathan Edwards, Kim Moore, Daljit Nagra and Karen McCarthy…
Burgage Hall Versopolis is a platform that unites 13 European Festivals to promote and translate their most exciting new poets. André Rudolph (Germany), Goran Colakhodžic (Croatia), Monica Aasprong (Norway), Samantha Barendson (France) and Judith Nika Pfeifer (Austria) share the stage with four of the UK poets: Jonathan Edwards, Kim Moore, Daljit Nagra and Karen McCarthy…
Community Hall Peter Tatchell has campaigned since 1967 on issues of human rights, democracy, LGBT freedom and global justice. In 1994, he named 10 Anglican bishops and urged them to “Tell The Truth” about their sexuality; accusing them of homophobia and hypocrisy. In 1999, in London, he ambushed the Zimbabwean President, Robert Mugabe, attempting a…
Burgage Hall Frank O’Hara, a poet whom Mark Doty described as “Urbane, ironic, sometimes genuinely celebratory and often wildly funny”, was simultaneously a subtle elegist. Daniel Kane’s talk will explore and identify how some of O’Hara’s best-loved and fun poems in his book Lunch Poems served as requiems for lost or unfinished art, music, and…
Burgage Hall James Fenton travels from New York to Ledbury to give a rare performance. This is an opportunity to hear “a modern master” according to Ian McEwan who says, “There is a strong case to be made that James Fenton is the finest poet writing in English. His technical virtuosity is beyond doubt; his…
Burgage Hall Aonghas MacNeacail is one of the best Gaelic poets writing today. He was born in Uig, on the Isle of Skye and writes in Gaelic, Scots and English. He won the prestigious Scottish Writer of the Year Stakis Prize with his third collection, Oideachadh Ceart /A Proper Schooling and his most recent collection…
Burgage Hall Mark Waldron is a brilliant and highly engaging reader of his work. He began writing poetry in his early 40s, has published The Brand New Dark and The Itchy Sea, and his third collection, Meanwhile, Trees, is due from Bloodaxe in May. “His work captures exactly the uncertain mix of what it is…
Community Hall Dame Eileen Atkins was born in a Salvation Army Women’s Hostel in north London. Her father was a gas meter reader; her mother, a seamstress and barmaid. A drama teacher taught her how to drop her Cockney accent, and she studied Shakespeare and Greek tragedies. Her breakthrough role in The Killing of Sister…
Burgage Hall Mark Doty’s many honours include the T. S. Eliot Prize. His poetry has long been celebrated for its risk and candour, an ability to find transcendent beauty even in the mundane and grievous. His latest collection Deep Lane is a book of descents: into the earth beneath the garden, into the dark substrata…
Burgage Hall Toni Stuart is a South African poet, performer and spoken word educator. Most recently she collaborated with the flamenco company dotdotdot dance as part of the Sadler’s Wells Wild Card Nights. She will be reading work from Krotoa-Eva’s Suite – a collection she is currently working on, which tells the largely unknown story…
Burgage Hall Amy Key’s debut collection Luxe “is a magnificent spree in a bric-a-brac shop. A haul of pre-loved and glittering objets – pralines in a crystal bowl, a handful of tame ladybirds, a portrait in vinyl and cola-cubes – are artfully displayed on the poems’ shelves to represent the conflicts and connections of a…
Baptist Church Something I Remember is the title of one of Eleanor Farjeon’s best-loved poems. Anne Harvey’s talk reveals the skill and surprising diversity of the writer who wrote poetry, plays and novels for adults and children and a moving memoir of her close friendship with Edward Thomas. She won three major awards: the Carnegie…
Burgage Hall. Christopher North and Jim Dening explore people, landscapes and ideas in reading from their recent work. Chris’s poems report surprising, sometimes serious, sometimes hilarious, events and encounters. Jim looks for meanings, echoes and ghosts in his narratives. Both poets love the force of words and the power of poetry to open new windows…
Burgage Hall Sir Jonathan Bate tells the inside story of the not undramatic process of writing a biography of Ted Hughes. Well known as a biographer, critic, broadcaster and scholar, he is Provost of Worcester College and Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. He has wide-ranging research interests in Shakespeare and Renaissance…
Community Hall Mike Harding is a poet, singer, songwriter, comedian, author, broadcaster and multiinstrumentalist. For fifteen years he presented a popular Folk, Roots and Acoustic Music programme on BBC Radio 2. His autobiography The Adventures of the Crumpsall Kid tells hilarious tales from his first day at infant school to playing in skiffle groups and…
Burgage Hall Piers Plowman is a disturbing and humorous commentary on corruption and greed that is still topical centuries later. Peter Sutton’s translation from the original Middle English preserves the energy, imagery and style of the original. Peter is both a brilliant academic and a superb actor. In the first part of the programme, he…
Burgage Hall The Eric Gregory Awards have identified the promise of some of our best poets including Sarah Howe who won the award and read at Ledbury in 2010. Listen to this year’s winners. Sponsored by
Burgage Hall The Poetry Society presents a celebratory reading from a selection of winners of the 2015 National Poetry Competition. The competition is the UK’s most prestigious award for a single poem, receiving over 12,000 entries. The judges Sarah Howe, Esther Morgan and David Wheatley chose from an unusually eclectic and exciting range of poems….
Community Hall Edmund de Waal is an artist and writer. He is best known for his large scale installations of porcelain vessels which are informed by his passion for architecture, space and sound. His family memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes won many literary prizes and has been translated into over 30 languages. Other works…
Burgage Hall Maitreyabandhu in conversation with Arundhathi Arundhathi Subramaniam is an award-winning poet and writer on spirituality and culture. She mostly lives in Mumbai (a city she is perennially on the verge of leaving). She has published two books of poetry in Britain, Where I Live: New & Selected Poems and When God Is a…
Burgage Hall Heathrow Airport landed, in the early 1940s, as if from outer space, on the ancient common land of Hounslow Heath. In Heath John Greening and Penelope Shuttle transcribe and review the conflicts of modern life, of finding an equilibrium between the excitements of travel and the benefits of trade, and the continuing desecration…
Burgage Hall McGuckian’s first major collection, The Flower Master, which explores post-natal breakdown, was awarded a Rooney prize for Irish Literature, and other awards. Since then she has published seven further collections. She was awarded the 2002 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Single Poem) for her poem She is in the Past, She Has This Grace….
Burgage Hall Shakespeare’s poems in original pronunciation. In 96 of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets there are couplets that don’t rhyme in modern English. In the major poems, similarly, there are many lines that should rhyme, but don’t, to modern ears. David Crystal explains the way sounds have changed since the 16th century, and describes the evolution…
The Walled Garden With Adam Horovitz Herefordshire poet in residence Adam Horovitz was commissioned to write ‘February in the Physic Garden’ at Hellens, Much Marcle. This inspired the Poetica Botanica. Contributors read their poems at this delightful event in the Walled Garden in the heart of Ledbury with the sounds of the town in the…
Burgage Hall Pictures and poems. As a painter, Frieda Hughes exhibits regularly and latterly has used the emotional and psychological elements of her poems as the basis for accompanying images, thereby combining what she calls ‘the two driving forces’ of her life. This combination of disciplines is the basis for her latest illustrated poetry collection,…
Burgage Hall Deryn Rees-Jones hosts this reading of Ledbury Poetry Competition winners. Jane Satterfield from America won first prize in the adult category with Rosie Shepperd and Nisha Bhakoo taking second and third prizes. The young winners include Shaliyah Grant, Daniella Cugini, Elin Gray, Inés Rossi, Kitty Prince and Victor Nogueira. This event was a wonderful…
Burgage Hall Poetry of Pathology and Neuroscience Valerie Laws is a poet, science poetry installation artist and mathematician/physicist and Anya Hurlbert is a Professor of Visual Neuroscience, Scientist Trustee of the National Gallery, and physicist. They will explore how poetry and science can inform each other and engage us all. Laws has worked with anatomists,…
Burgage Hall The Mahabharata, one of South-Asia’s foundational epics, is as much an interrogation of power and morality as a rousing saga of gods and heroes. In Until the Lions, Karthika Naïr refracts the epic through the lenses of peripheral figures and silent catalysts: nameless soldiers, outcast warriors, handmaidens, abducted princesses… Readings from the book…
Burgage Hall This event was conceived in response to the news that Iranian poets Fatemeh Ekhtesari and Mehdi Mousavi, who were sentenced to 11.5 and 9 years in prison respectively, and also sentenced to 99 lashes each for shaking hands with unrelated members of the opposite sex at a poetry festival in Sweden. Athena Farrokhzad and Ziba…
Burgage Hall Sarah Howe won the T.S Eliot Prize for her first collection Loop of Jade, an intimate exploration of Howe’s Anglo-Chinese heritage through her journeys to Hong Kong to discover her roots. “Rich and fierce, Sarah Howe’s poems are alive to the complex stories and voices that cohere around objects, family and place. This…
Burgage Hall (A technical fault meant that only the first 26 minutes of this event were recorded – very sorry) Born in al-Kufa (Iraq) in 1955, Adnan al-Sayegh is one of the most original voices from the generation of Iraqi poets known as the Eighties Movement. His poetry, crafted with elegance, and sharp as an…
Burgage Hall Athena Farrokhzad was born in Iran in 1983, grew up in Sweden and lives in Stockholm. She is a poet, literary critic, translator, playwright and teacher of creative writing. After several years of collaborative poetry projects and international collaborations she published her first volume of poetry in 2013, Vitsvit / White Blight. The…
