Daljit Nagra to chair Royal Society of Literature in its 200th year
Award-winning poet Daljit Nagra has been appointed chair of the council of the Royal Society of Literature, it was announced today. The Bookseller quoted him as saying: "Becoming chair of the RSL is the greatest professional honour of my life.
“I look forward to continuing our work in celebrating the diversity and wealth of classic and contemporary literature. As literature finds new readers a...
30th November 2020
Frieda Hughes, Much Wenlock, 2014
Frieda Hughes gave up writing poetry in her 20s because she could not bear to be constantly compared with her parents, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, she told a Wenlock poetry festival audience on Saturday. The artist and writer began composing poetry again at the age of 34 only after suffering a debi...
29th November 2020
British Library says sorry to family of Ted Hughes after linking distant ancestor to slave trade
The British Library has apologised to the family of the former poet laureate Ted Hughes, after it linked him to the slave trade through a distant ancestor.
Hughes’s name had been included on a spre...
26th November 2020
Huddersfield Choral Society to premiere two pandemic works with words by Simon Armitage
Huddersfield Choral Society will on Saturday 28 November be performing two new works in response to Covid-19, with lyrics by the poet laureate Simon Armitage, and music by composers Cheryl Frances-Hoa...
25th November 2020
Her Lost Language: Jenny Mitchell, Indigo Dreams
London-based poet and playwright Jenny Mitchell has had poems broadcast on Radio 4 and BBC2, and has conducted workshops in environments ranging from the Caribbean Women’s Writers Alliance, the NUT Bl...
25th November 2020
Amy Glynn wins £2,000 Troubadour international poetry prize
Amy Glynn has won the £2,000 Troubadour international poetry prize with her poem ‘Entre-Deux-Mers, June’. She is from Lafayette, California. Second was Michael Lavers, from Provo, Utah, with ‘Filter Q...
25th November 2020
Move top poetry prize nights out of London, urges TS Eliot judge
One of the current judges of the TS Eliot prize has suggested staging the next live TS Eliot Prize reading event at somewhere like Scarborough or Grimsby, instead of in London.
Award-winning poet A...
25th November 2020
Eavan Boland, who died earlier this year, on Costa poetry shortlist
The Irish poet Eavan Boland, who died earlier this year aged 75, has been shortlisted in the poetry category of the Costa Book Awards, it was announced on Tuesday night. Her most recent collection, Th...
24th November 2020
Leading Australian poet admits borrowing without attribution after intervention by poetry sleuth
Has poetry sleuth Ira Lightman cracked another major case? It would appear so, judging by a recent public admission by a leading and multi-award-winning Australian poet. The Australian newspaper has r...
24th November 2020
'Did you leave with the winnowing scythe, the burning heat of August?'
We have lots of poets who would enjoy being described as “a poet first, and a (fill in the job) second", as if for them writing poems is the most important thing in their lives. As I see it, Patricia ...
23rd November 2020
Jeremy Reed, Aldeburgh, 2015
Jeremy Reed added a touch of sparkle – quite a few touches of sparkle, in fact – to the Aldeburgh poetry festival on Friday night. Sprinkling handfuls of blue glitter into the air at regular intervals...
21st November 2020
Celebrate with a brew! Film of poem by Julian Jordon on theme of refugees and cuppas wins TV award
A short film made last year for Refugee Week of a poem – a villanelle – by Write Out Loud’s Julian Jordon has won the animation category in the Royal Television Society’s Yorkshire awards. The award w...
21st November 2020
Joy Harjo appointed to third consecutive term as US poet laureate
The first Native American poet to serve as America’s poet laureate, Joy Harjo, has been reappointed to a rare third term by the Library of Congress. Harjo, a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, was...
19th November 2020
Write Out Loud's Gig Guide is back - for online poetry events
Write Out Loud’s Gig Guide is back – but just for events staged online at the moment. Our Gig Guide – which provided the spur for the formation of Write Out Loud almost two decades ago - was removed f...
19th November 2020
'If I've made researches, I have to present information ... basically I'm a tireless Googler': Ira Lightman
The Australian newspaper reported Judith Beveridge as saying that “you speak as if the entire body and character of my work is made up of borrowings, but that is a minuscule fraction of my total outpu...
16th November 2020
'The streetlights outside flashing off one by one like old men blinking their cloudy eyes'
James Crews is the editor of a very timely anthology entitled Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection, published by Green Writers Press. He’s also an accomplished poet and the author of s...
16th November 2020
Louise Fazackerley, Manchester, 2016
In the week that a headteacher gave pyjama-clad parents a dressing-gown dressing down, Manchester’s Z-Arts’ Family Theatre invited audience and staff to turn up thus clad to both Saturday showings of ...
14th November 2020
Foyle Young Poets celebrate huge rise in number of poems entered as winners announced
The Poetry Society has announced today the top 15 winners and 85 commended poets of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award 2020 at a virtual prize-giving ceremony.
14th November 2020
Our document of an uncertain, unsettling, painful, frightening, uplifting time
Poetry in the time of coronavirus. Many copies of Write Out Loud’s Beyond the Storm poetry competition anthology have now been mailed out - and thanks for your enthusaistic reponses to receiving them...
12th November 2020
Hokusai's Passion: John Sewell, Offa's Press
For me, poetry becomes much more interesting when it is multi-layered, comprising a coalescence of two or more seemingly different yet related subjects in which both poet and reader are left to make t...
12th November 2020
Simon Armitage reads 'The Bed' at centenary service for Unknown Warrior
The poet laureate, Simon Armitage, on Armistice Day - Wednesday 11 November - read a new poem, ‘The Bed’, to mark the 100th anniversary of the burial of the Unknown Warrior at Westminster Abbey. The p...
12th November 2020
'That dove, I thought, will house his sable spirit, coat feathered like joy in the wind'
The ocarina call of a mourning dove, a woman mourning the death of a pet, and yet it all comes to looking forward to more and more life, whatever is there, wherever the mourning dove will lead her. Li...
11th November 2020
Poets get together to aid Black Lives Matter UK with single release
A group of artists and producers have come together to release a single supporting Black Minds Matter UK. ‘Birds’ is a poetic collaboration between the Tongue Fu collective and poets Salena Godden, pi...
11th November 2020
Poetry in Aldeburgh's online festival this weekend
Poetry in Aldeburgh is offering a weekend online festival from 12-15 November with 12 workshops – now fully booked - and 15 readings, talks and evening events, and over 60 poets. The festival’s themes...
10th November 2020
WE'RE BUILDING A NEW WRITE OUT LOUD – AND ASKING OUR POETRY COMMUNITY TO HELP US
We all know that the world has changed immeasurably since March. Almost as much as it has done since Write Out Loud was formed nearly two decades ago. And one thing that’s been clear for all of us to ...
10th November 2020
Two poems - by Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen - for Remembrance
For Remembrance, Write Out Loud would like to share two very well-known poems from the first world war, by Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. Owen wrote: "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The ...
10th November 2020
Four poets to spark ideas on journeys, new beginnings, identity and belonging
In response to the 400-year anniversary of the Mayflower sailing from the UK, ArtfulScribe, the Southampton-based writer development agency, in partnership with Winchester poetry festival, is offering...
10th November 2020
Andrew Motion and the poetry of war, 2015
When the BBC sent Andrew Motion to talk to Harry Patch, who was then Britain’s last surviving first world war solder, and who died in 2009 at the age of 111, it was “my most interesting commission whi...
7th November 2020
'Never resting, working from sheer will and memory, working with quill and ink if need be'
Over the years I haven’t chosen more than a few poems about the writing of poetry, mostly because if you don’t write poems you might not be interested. But I do like this poem about poets by Richard J...
7th November 2020
