Poetry Reading Group 

with Kathryn Bevis
Friday 13 August
7:00pm - 8:30pm

Join us for an exciting, new, online poetry gathering on the second Friday of each month where we’ll read and discuss some of the most brilliant voices in contemporary poetry, including poems written by Winchester Poetry Festival’s featured poets for 2021.

Each month will be themed and we’ll get to know a handful of brilliant poems related to that theme, making time to see how they might reflect, amplify, complicate, contradict, or bewilder each other when read together. These will be animated, inspiring evenings for us all to learn more from each other about the peculiar pleasures of reading poems. Readings will be shared in advance and all are welcome: poetry newbies, poetry fanatics, and poetry experts alike.

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This month's theme is Silence.

Workshop 

with Sarah Hymas
Saturday 14 August
10:00am - 12:00 noon

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This two hour workshop is for writers who are chewing over a new idea and would appreciate time and space to find a way into, or momentum for, their project at its outset. The Imaginarium is a place of imaginative exploration and collective dreaming, where writing projects can roam, without too much of a plan. Writers of any genre are welcome. A mixed group will enrich the various ways we shape the worlds we write. Through prompts for free writing, group discussions and smaller sharings, these two hours will give new writing projects the impetus to fly.

 

Each participant will receive a preparatory email before the 14th so we don't start from cold, and one to follow on to keep the process flowing.

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For more information see Imaginariums ​  

Professor Will May with readings by Juliet Stevenson

Saturday 14 August
3:00pm
 

Fifty years since Stevie Smith’s death and the posthumous publication of Sylvia Plath’s landmark volume, Crossing the Water, this lecture explores the relationship between two extraordinary American and British poets who never met, but whose work and lives were intricately connected. Bringing together interviews and correspondence, and including readings by Juliet Stevenson, this year’s Robert Hutchison lecture will consider what these two distinctive writers can tell us about who we choose as our mentors, and why they don’t always play along.

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This lecture is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Raymond Antrobus & Leo Boix with Dzifa Benson

Saturday 14 August
From 6:00pm
 

Poet, playwright, critic and curator Dzifa Benson hosts a salon event with poets Raymond Antrobus and Leo Boix, both sparkling, thoughtful, engaging performers.

 

Expect an hour of heartwarming and gorgeous readings, and informal discussion about the craft of poetry and the journeys of both poets. Boix’s debut collection Ballad of a Happy Immigrant was published this summer by Chatto and Windus. Ilya Kaminsky wrote that it ‘ sings the doors open’. Antrobus won the Ted Hughes Prize for his collection The Perseverance, described by Malika Booker as 'courageous autobiographical poems of praise, difficulties, testimony and love.’

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