This year's poetry festival...

Chloe Garner, Festival Director: The dates for the next Festival are 2 - 11 July 2010. The 2009 events still feature on the website. They will give you a feeling for what happens at the Ledbury Poetry Festival and what you can expect for 2010. The Guardian wrote, “This celebration of verse is the largest of its kind in the UK and also the most energised, giving a real sense of poetry as an important living, contemporary literary form.” So put the dates in your diary.

We will publish a preview of the 2010 Festival in our Poetry Competition Leaflet early in the new year, so if you would like to receive a copy or you want to enter the poetry competition contact us using the link at the top of the page and we will add you to the mailing list.

Alice Oswald was one of Carol Ann Duffy’s Festival highlights, as well as Hugo Williams and Daljit Nagra

Three of the internationally renowned poets due to appear at the 2009 Festival were denied entry to the UK because of harsh new home office rules. The poets were Dorothea Rosa Herliany from Indonesia, Hassan Najmi and Widad Benmoussa from Morocco. We did not cancel these events and instead used them as a platform to launch a protest and encourage our audiences to join the growing campaign against these new regulations. Ledbury Poetry Festival has always welcomed poets from all over the world and is extremely proud that it has an international reputation. This is the first time that poets coming from outside the EU have had any difficulty in appearing at the Festival. The consequences of these new restrictions are that we in the UK are being denied the opportunity to see and hear these poets.
For further information on the campaign against the new regulations visit the Manifesto Club website.

Poetry Competition
Winners Announced!
I am pleased to announce that Mick Wood won our 2009 adult category Poetry Competition prize, which is a Ty Newydd writing course. All the winners in all the categories, including children and young people, are published on the competition pages. Daljit Nagra, this year’s poet in residence and competition judge, wrote about Mick Wood’s poem Trashbots:
“From the many poems I read, Trashbots stood out because of its arresting, lively and eccentrically witty style. It is a poem that demands the reader’s attention for the way it teases our attitude to consumption.
The poem is full of odd words and the verses are neatly packaged so as not to obstruct the quirky story. Above all I wanted to award this poem the first prize because of its risk-taking!”

The new Poet Laureate
Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy picked out Alice Oswald as one of her personal highlights in this year's Ledbury Poetry Festival, describing her as "an English lyric genius and arguably the most relevant poet of our times". Alice has won the Forward Prize for The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile and the T.S. Eliot Prize for Dart. She arrives in Ledbury with two acclaimed new collections A Sleepwalk on the Severn and Weeds and Wild Flowers.

Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy

"This year's programme offers a truly fantastic array of poets in a feast of world-class events"
Carol Ann Duffy, May 2009