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Winchester Poetry Festival is planned for Oct 2027




Winchester Poetry Festival events 2026
Winchester Poetry Festival is a biennial festival, with our next full festival taking place in 2027 - subject to funding.
We also host and collaborate on poetry events throughout the year, the details and ticket links for which are below.
We ensure that as many activities as possible are free to attend, to ensure everyone feels able to participate. Donations are welcomed (link at bottom of page)
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F.T. Prince Memorial Lecture: Denise Riley 'Does The Poem Think?'
Avenue Campus. Lecture Theatre B. Southampton, England AND online
Tuesday 27th October | 6-7:30pm
For this year’s F.T. Prince Memorial Lecture, the Department of English at the University of Southampton is delighted to welcome Denise Riley whose lecture is 'Does The Poem Think?'
Denise Riley is one of the most important poets at work in the English language.
“On skulls, poems, bones, and spirits.
The poets invoked will included Byron, Wordsworth, and a number of twentieth century and contemporary authors.”
She will be in conversation with Toby Litt, Associate Professor in Creative Writing.
Denise Riley was born in 1948 and lives in London. She previously taught at the University of East Anglia. Her prose books include War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and Mother (1983), ‘Am I That Name?’ Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History (1988), The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony (2000), The Force of Language (with Jean-Jacques Lecercle; 2004), Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect (2005), Time Lived, Without Its Flow (2012; revised edition 2019) and A Chorus of Ears: On the ‘Voice of the Poem’, 2026. Her poetry collections include Marxism for Infants (1977), Dry Air (1985), Mop Mop Georgette (1993), Penguin Modern Poets series 2, vol 10 (with Douglas Oliver and Iain Sinclair; 1996), Selected Poems (2000, revised 2019), Say Something Back (2016), Penguin Modern Poets series 3, vol 6 (with Maggie Nelson and Claudia Rankine; 2017), Lurex (2022)
Tickets are free, but must be booked in advance
Please note, tickets for Winchester Poetry Festival events are bookable directly from this page. Please do not purchase tickets from resale websites/marketplaces. Tickets for collaborative events may be hosted by other platforms. You can find our refund policy here.
If you have queries regarding tickets, or are concerned your ticket is not valid please email hello@winchesterpoetryfestival.org