Supported by National Lottery Heritage Fund, Winchester City Council, Winchester BID and the people of Winchester, we announced our Poet On The High Street in 2021.

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Stand-up poet and performer Jonny Fluffypunk embarked on a five-month residency taking Winchester’s communities and businesses on a journey of expression, imagination and creativity to shine a light on the changing face of the historic city’s High Street. 

Jonny held variety of workshops and performance events on Winchester High Street, encouraging people of all ages to express what matters to them about the past and to share its significance with others. 

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Outcomes included a printed anthology of community poems 'Winchester: A Poetic History in Inconsequential Moments' and an interactive map of the city.

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In conjunction with Artful Scribe and the University of Southampton's AHRC supported Invisible Mentors research project, we connected three young poets (April Egan, Kaycee Hill, Eve Wright) with three poetry mentors (Aviva Dautch, Caleb Parkin, Romalyn Ante) to challenge, guide and help them bloom.

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With Arts Council England funding during 2018-20 we continued our outreach projects including working with students at Treloar College. Our 2020 artist/poet ‘in residence’, Sophie Herxheimer, animated the festival space that year and said: 

'As part of my residency remit, I had the pleasure of working with students at Hampshire based Treloar's College. Students made poetry flags choosing words and pictures to show the world who they are and what they like to do. I hung the flags in the library, where they were admired by many visitors.'

Developing local young writers

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In summer 2018, Winchester Poetry Festival launched Young Wordsmiths, an intensive creative writing course for young people with a focus on poetry.  Aiming to bring together a small group of committed local sixth-formers to work with each other, their teachers and an experienced poet ‘mentor’, to build their confidence and skill in crafting powerful words on the page. 

Offered free of charge, Young Wordsmiths was aimed specifically at lower sixth English students who’d like to try their hand at creative writing, or who want to write even better. In 2018, we worked with students and teachers from five local sixth forms: Barton Peveril, Peter Symonds’ College, St Swithun’s School, Queen Mary’s College, Basingstoke and Winchester College.

The world’s first and only mobile poetic first aid service

A mix of the serious, the therapeutic and the theatrical, the Emergency Poet offers consultations inside her ambulance and prescribes poems as cures. In the waiting room under an attached awning Nurse Verse dispenses poemcetamols and other poetic pills and treatments from theCold Comfort Pharmacy. There are skulls, jars of eyeballs and other body parts inside the ambulance.

In partnership with Solent Mind, in September the festival is providing a series of creative poetry writing workshops for the clients of the Winchester Wellbeing Centre. Called Free as a Word they will focus on encouraging participants to express themselves and develop their confidence through writing poetry. 

Solent Mind is the leading mental health charity across Hampshire. Find out more about what they do at www.solentmind.org.uk.

A series of workshops for the physically disabled students and young people at Treloar School near Alton, Hampshire. This pioneering school and college was established in 1908 by Sir William Purdie Treloar, Lord Mayor of the City of London, and used to be known as Lord Mayor Treloar College. Catering for students aged from 2-25, Treloar’s is one of the country's leading providers of education, care, therapy, medical support and independence training for disabled young people, preparing them for the challenges of independent living and personal development, learning skills for life and gaining qualifications or employment. 

What would a single line of poetry look like if it became a physical object? It would, of course, depend on the line. In the two weeks before the poetry festival, the Fine Art students of Winchester School of Art will be studying poems by all of the poets appearing in the festival. From this material, they will select just one line to serve as the starting point for a large-scale collective artwork, which they will construct in the sculpture studio. The department has made a habit of beginning its academic year in this way, with some 150 students collaborating on a single artwork. The results are unpredictable but always impressive. 

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What do you expect to read on a notice board in a hospital waiting area?  Probably not a poem by a celebrated poet, but that’s exactly what you will find in the waiting rooms of the Basingstoke & North Hampshire Hospital and the Royal Hampshire County Hospital in Winchester in the run up to our next festival. In a joint project with the Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust we have collaborated to bring poetry into hospitals because it is now well recognised that poetry can provide support and comfort, as well as distraction, in a healing environment.

We had a fantastic day on Saturday 23 April when we presented an all-day reading of all 154 of Shakespeare's sonnets as a part of the Shakespeare400 celebrations taking place across the country. The event was a huge success with a constant flow of listeners and participants, including some remarkably good readers young and not so young, right through until the end.