Welcome to Winchester Poetry Festival
Winchester Poetry Day will take place Saturday 5 October 2024.
What's On
September
The Poetry Salon will be held live online via Zoom.
SOLD OUT
Poetry Salon
Poetry Reading Group
with Kathryn Bevis
Friday 10 September
7:00 - 9:00pm
Join us for the latest in our second Friday online poetry gatherings. We will 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: the poetry curious and poetry fanatics alike.
This month's theme is Sleep.
The Workshop will be held live online via Zoom.
SOLD OUT
Silence & writing beyond language
Workshop
with Andrew McMillan
Saturday 11 September
10:00am - 12:00 noon
Join Andrew McMillan in this two hour workshop exploring writing without a topic.
"So often writing workshops set us a topic or give us a ’thing’ and tell us to write about it, but how might we write into an absence, into a gap, into a thing which is not there? How might we be able to write into the thing which sits beyond language itself? I’m not sure I know, but I look forward to finding out together!”
- Andrew McMillan
It is with great regret that we hear that Greg Gilbert has died. In an announcement on social media his wife Stacey Heale said that he ‘had gently slipped away into the stars’. Greg was due to have taken part in this year’s festival but his deteriorating health made this difficult to achieve.
This event ‘Renaissance Man’ is being re-scheduled to feature readings of his poems and will be made available in due course.
Greg Gilbert: Renaissance Man
Date & time tbc
Greg Gilbert is a Renaissance man, a multi talented artist, singer and poet.
Based in Southampton Greg has used his art (which featured in an exhibition alongside the work of Da Vinci in the Southampton City Art Gallery in 2019) and poetry to deal with a devastating cancer diagnosis.
Greg's pamphlet Love Makes a Mess of Dying was chosen for publication by the former Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy and published by the Poetry Business.
This event will be recorded and broadcast via YouTube. Book and watch later.
£5.00
New Voices
Isabelle Baafi, Ben Bransfield & Shash Trevett in discussion with Kathryn Bevis
Saturday 11 September
6:30pm
Three strong and varied new poetic voices published by two powerful small presses: Ben Bransfield and Shash Trevett launch debut pamphlets with The Poetry Business and Isabelle Baafi’s Ignition debut was the Poetry Book Society’s Spring Choice.
Find out about some of the UK poetry scene’s future stars and enjoy a sparkling evening of online poetry.
To book visit our Ticketsource booking page here.