Series: Festival 2017

Showcase and Celebration This event showcases poets at all stages of their development: John Masefield High School Students have worked with the school’s poet in residence Brenda Read-Brown to create their poems. The Foyle …[Read More]

Sean Hughes is best known for being a team captain on the BBC’s hit quiz show Never Mind the Buzzcocks. He has toured up and down the country as well as abroad with …[Read More]

Acclaimed Kurdish poet Bejan Matur presents a new chapbook of her poems, in English translation by T.S. Eliot Prize-winning poet Jen Hadfield. This was an electrifying hour of poetry in Kurdish, Turkish and English, …[Read More]

An event celebrating poetry that uses rhyme and meter. A.E. Stallings is an American poet, a MacArthur Fellow, who studied Classics. She has published three collections of poetry, Archaic Smile, …[Read More]

Two American poets who share a wry, dark humour: Thomas Lynch, hailed by The New York Times as a cross between Garrison Keillor and William Butler Yeats, gives us glimpses …[Read More]

Hosted by Imtiaz Dharker, with guest appearance from previous winner Jacqueline Saphra. The prestigious Ledbury Poetry Competition has helped many emerging poets including Jacob Polley who won the 2016 T.S. Eliot Prize. ‘ Winning the …[Read More]

This event is curated by our poet in residence Fiona Sampson. She says, ‘Poetry opens a door on the world. Right now, Romania’s women poets are among the best writing anywhere. I love …[Read More]

Mslexia is making an appearance at ‘the UK’s most popular poetry festival’. This time poets are invited to come along to our Meet the Poetry Editors event featuring an informal Q&A session …[Read More]

Born and educated in Gaya, a small town in Bihar, India, Tabish Khair is the author of various acclaimed books, including the poetry collections, Where Parallel Lines Meet and Man of Glass. In 2016, …[Read More]

Join the Herefordshire Stanza Poets in the Baptist Hall as they mark the 50th Anniversary of the death of Ledbury’s Poet Laureate as they read their own poems inspired by his life and …[Read More]

Richard Dawkins is one of the most respected scientists in the world and from 1995 to 2008 was the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. His most recent …[Read More]

Choman Hardi was born in Sulaimani, Kurdistan, and lived in Iraq and Iran before seeking asylum in the UK in 1993. Her collection Considering the Women explores the equivocal relationship between immigrants and their …[Read More]

Poems and Music This specially devised performance combines musical ‘miniatures’ by composer Benjamin Tassie and readings from All My Mad Mothers, which explores love, sex and family relationships in vivacious, lush poems that span …[Read More]

With Christopher Merrill, Maria Galina and Patrick Dubost. Hosted by Fiona Sampson Curated by poet in residence Fiona Sampson who says, ‘To work internationally is to understand that poets’ working lives differ according to their …[Read More]

The first half of Event 33 is stand-up poet, armchair revolutionary and recumbent rocker, Elvis McGonagall. He is the sole resident of The Graceland Caravan Park. Laugh and cry over poems including …[Read More]

Having stolen the show from John Cooper Clarke in 2015, Luke Wright returns with The Toll Discover a country riven by inequality and corruption but sustained by a surreal, gallows humour. This is the …[Read More]

What is most distinctive about the American contemporary poetic voice? It may be its democratic vernacular, its elasticity, its plainness of style, its life-giving vulgarity, its pragmatism, its materialism, its self-regard, or its humour. …[Read More]

The novelist Andrew O’Hagan travelled with Seamus Heaney, and their friend the great editor Karl Miller, to Scotland, Ireland and Wales, In this talk he describes those journeys traversing over language and language, in …[Read More]

Why we must not untangle Pablo Neruda’s life from his work, nor the music from the poetry A seminar by Adam Feinstein As Neruda’s acclaimed biographer, Adam Feinstein, demonstrates in this seminar, the extraordinary …[Read More]

Roy McFarlane reads from his first collection Beginning With Your Last Breath which opens with a deeply moving account of the discovery of an adoption and moves through lost love and friendships, the politics …[Read More]

Hugh Dennis found fame with The Mary Whitehouse Experience and as an actor and comedian is known and loved for The Now Show, Outnumbered, Mock the Week and cult hit …[Read More]

Paddy Ashdown was the Liberal Party leader. He is the author of seven books and an outspoken critic of Brexit. He shares the poems that have travelled with him though his life …[Read More]

Peace, Love and Potatoes One of the country’s most popular poets – eccentric and very funny – John Hegley returns to Ledbury! The reading (and singing) consists largely of poems from John Hegley’s …[Read More]

‘The Cause’ was the Victorian name for what we now call feminism and was adopted by women’s movements as they fought for the vote. Jan Long takes you on an immersive journey exploring …[Read More]

The Eric Gregory Awards consistently identify some of the best young poets including Sarah Howe, Andrew McMillan and many of the poets who headline the Festival. Listen to this year’s winners, Rachael Allen, …[Read More]

Hear poems read by the three winners of the the 2016 National Poetry Competition run by The Poetry Society. First prize winner Stephen Sexton lives in Belfast where he is studying …[Read More]

Three Irish poets all published by Bloodaxe. Jane Clarke’s first collection is The River. ‘Clear, direct, lovely: Jane Clarke’s voice slips into the Irish tradition with such ease, it is as though …[Read More]

Say Something Back, described by The Guardian as ‘heartfelt and deeply necessary’, will allow readers to see just why the name of Denise Riley has been held in such high regard by her fellow …[Read More]

Next Generation Poet Melissa Lee-Houghton has been affected by mental health issues. The themes this event explores include trauma/anguish, mental health and the therapeutic benefits of writing poetry.   Melissa …[Read More]

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Hope End and anti-slavery poetry In 1847 The Liberty Bell, a Boston Anti-slavery annual, published Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point, one of the most powerful, shocking poems …[Read More]

Voices of the Isle of Erraid echo through Miriam Nash’s first collection, All the Prayers in the House. The poems take the form of songs, letters, fragments, formal verse – many kinds of …[Read More]

Malika’s Poetry Kitchen is a community of poets dedicated to developing their craft. Founded in 2001 and based in London, the collective’s influence on the contemporary poetry and spoken word scene has reached …[Read More]

Unfortunately Helen Mort, who was scheduled to appear at this event, was unavoidably delayed so Jacob Sam La Rose, one of the founding members of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen, stepped in at …[Read More]

Two poet-translators rattle their sabres and sharpen their swords for a duel of words and French poetry.  Join Sasha Dugdale who talks to Olivia McCannon and Susan Wicks to compare their translations …[Read More]

A poetry salon with Roger Robinson, Nick Makoha and Seni Seneviratne from Peepal Tree Press. Roger Robinson is a dub poet writing songs about common people and their plight. He co-founded Malika’s Poetry …[Read More]

Versopolis is a platform that unites 13 European Festivals to promote and translate their most exciting new poets. Tiziano Fratus (Italy), Charlotte Van den Broeck (Belgium), Nikolina Andova (Macedonia), Veronika Dintinjana (Slovenia), Yekta (France) share …[Read More]