Newcastle University’s Centre for the Literary Arts will be staging Newcastle poetry festival from 1-4 May, with a line-up that includes TS Eliot prize winner Hannah Sullivan, Forward best first collection prize winner Phoebe Power, American poets Terrance Hayes and Mary Ruefle, and Jamaican poet Ishion Hutchinson.

Other highlights include a dramatic re-enactment of the life of Bertolt Brecht with poet David Constantine and soprano Sarah Gabriel, and the Northern Poetry Symposium Inter/Play, exploring poetry’s intersections with visual art, the digital and the body, at Sage Gateshead.

The director of the Centre for the Literary Arts is Sinéad Morrissey, and Sean O’Brien, Jackie Kay, WN Herbert and Jacob Polley all teach there. It is building on Newcastle’s traditions as a poetry city, which include the 1960s readings at Morden Tower, and its location as the birthplace of Basil Bunting and Bloodaxe Books. More festival details