This year's poetry festival...

Chloe Garner, Festival Director:
This year's Festival is now finished. The dates for the next Ledbury Poetry Festival are 1 - 10 July 2011.

Poetry Competition
Winners Announced!

I am pleased to announce that Maitreyabandhu from London has won our 2010 adult category Poetry Competition prize, which is a Ty Newydd writing course. All the winners in all the categories, including children and young people, judged by Brian Moses, are published on the competition pages. Billy Collins, this year’s poet in residence and Adult Category competition judge, wrote about Maitreyabandhu’s poem The Cutting:
“Any reader will appreciate how this poem deftly moves from a precise natural setting to a false remembering then to another memory both real and sexually vivid. The thundering train at the end leaves us pleasantly stunned.”

Festival 2010

"If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry" wrote Emily Dickinson. What a way to describe the intensity and excitement of hearing great poetry and discovering new poets and poems that you might read again and again for the rest of your life.

Holly Pester and James Wilkes work collaboratively on themed poetry sets which explore forms of performed texts and live word-scores. Catch them on Friday 2 July at 9.30pm.

We present a huge range of events from readings, to talks, walks, open mics and performances combining poetry with music, dance and good food. There will be many opportunities for discussion, laughter, creativity, as well as revelry and dancing!

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.

The Festival campaigns:

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.