Workshop with Suzanne Conway

Saturday 11th October

10 - 11:30am​

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Join Suzanne Conway for this writing workshop inspired by Edward Thomas and Keats, presented in collaboration with The Edward Thomas Fellowship.

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What do Edward Thomas’s Liberty and The Glory, and Keats’s O thou whose face hath felt the winter’s wind and Ode to a Nightingale have in common? These poems will be used as stimulus to inspire attendees' own writing. This workshop will explore and celebrate nature, symbolism, the past, idleness, and our own – and Edward Thomas's – glorious complexity.

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Suzanne Conway is a poet, writer and teacher. She has published articles, essays, reviews, and over thirty poems in magazines and anthologies, including The Poetry Review, The Dark Horse, The North, Acumen, The London Magazine, and elsewhere. She teaches for the Poetry School and the University of Exeter.

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The Edward Thomas Fellowship was founded in 1980 to perpetuate the memory of Edward Thomas, foster interest in his life and works, and arrange events which extend these interests.​

 

Suitable for: all

Duration: 1.5 hours

Format: in person workshop

Access: wheelchair accessible throughout

Celebration presented by Damian Kelly-Basher

Saturday 11th October 

11 - 12pm

 

A special invitation-only event with Hampshire Poet, Damian Kelly-Basher, to celebrate those who entered Hampshire Young Poets Competition 2025

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This year we are celebrating the birthday of Hampshire author Jane Austen, who was born 250 years ago. Jane had many friends, and often wrote about friendship in her novels. Inspired by Jane, her life and the stories she wrote, entrants were invited to explore the theme of 'friendship'.

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Hampshire Young Poets is a partnership between Winchester Poetry Festival and Hampshire Cultural Trust.

Prizes are kindly sponsored by Paris Smith and P&G Wells.

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Dzifa Benson

Saturday 11th October 

12 - 12:30pm

 

Sit with award-winning multi-disciplinary artist Dzifa Benson as she discusses with you a poem which she has found important and inspirational to her personal poetic journey.

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Poem tbc.

 

Close readings are a firm favourite with the festival audience. These micro-lectures are free to attend and will take place in the ARC Space.

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Suitable for: all

Duration: 0.5 hours

Format: in person micro-lecture

Access: wheelchair accessible throughout, transcripts available

Isabelle Baafi, Erica Hesketh, Dzifa Benson

Saturday 11th October 

1 - 2pm

 

Three major new talents in British poetry, remaking poetic forms from renga and dramatic monologue to concrete poetry. Readings will be followed by a discussion about the pleasures and pressures of being a debut poet, and the poets who have inspired them.

Hosted by Clare Pollard.

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Isabelle Baafi is the author of Chaotic Good (Faber & Faber / Wesleyan University Press, 2025), which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her writing has been published in Granta, The TLS, The Poetry Review, Callaloo, The London Magazine, and elsewhere.

 

Erica Hesketh is a poet and editor, originally from Japan and Denmark, now based in London. From 2016 to 2024 she was Director of the Poetry Translation Centre. Her debut collection, In the Lily Room, is published by Nine Arches Press.

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Dzifa Benson is an award-winning artist whose multidisciplinary practice intersects literature, science, theatre, art, the body, ritual, performance, teaching and immersive technologies. Her work has been awarded fellowships from the Jerwood Foundation and Hedgebrook, and was shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry Prize 2022 and the inaugural James Berry Poetry Prize. Her debut poetry collection, Monster, is published by Bloodaxe Books.

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Suitable for: all

Duration: 1 hour

Format: in person event. Poetry readings and conversation

Access: wheelchair accessible venue throughout

Workshop with Susmita Bhattacharya

Saturday 11th October

1 - 2:30pm

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Can conversations be poetic? Can poems be conversational? In this workshop we will experiment with both forms. Taking inspiration from The Bard’s creation of words and phrases, can we turn our everyday routines into something unique?

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Let us wear our 'hearts on our sleeves' and create conversational poems. 'The world is your oyster'!

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This session is suitable for anyone and everyone willing to experiment with language, sound, making conversation and having fun with the poetic form.

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Susmita Bhattacharya’s novel, The Normal State of Mind, was longlisted at the Mumbai Film Festival. Table Manners won the Saboteur Award for Best Short-Story Collection and was aired on BBC Radio 4 Extra. She mentors and runs creative workshops in the Solent region.​

 

Suitable for: all ages, all abilities, no experience of reading or writing poetry required.

Duration: 1.5 hours

Format: in person workshop

Access: wheelchair accessible throughout, relaxed event, all resources provided.

Ismael Mansoor, Simon Meats, Kane Holborn

Saturday 11th October

2:30 - 3:30pm

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An exciting mix of sound, performance and language revealing the diversity of our current poetry scene. These three poets show how, for centuries, Polari, BSL and disabled voices have contributed to our English language and popular culture.

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Unity101 FM competition winners will be announced at this event.

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Damian Kelly-Basher (Hampshire Poet 2024–26) has performed around the UK, including The Royal Albert Hall, Edinburgh Fringe and WOMAD. He works across the county with arts organisations, councils, schools and community groups to encourage people to take part in reading, writing and performing poetry. Damian was also an NHS Community Nurse and is interested in wellbeing and sustainability.

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Ismael Mansoor, a Deaf poet, began writing in 2010, driven by a passion for self-expression. In 2018, he started performing signed poetry. As the BDA’s BSL Poet Laureate (2024–2025), his work continues to redefine the power of expression.

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Simon Meats wrote comedy pilots for the BBC, performed at Edinburgh Fringe and was a BBC North Playwright Finalist. He’s currently researching a book on post-1960s comedy/ drama. “He should be ashamed of himself,” – Barry Took (co-creator of Round the Horne).

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Dr. Kane Holborn explores ideas surrounding ekphrasis in his research, and blends visual art with written poetry to explore his experiences with memory loss, art, space and disability. Kane’s work has appeared in The Lost Art of Staring into Fires and Votext Magazine.

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Suitable for: all

Duration: 1 hour

Format: in person event. Poetry readings and conversation

Access: wheelchair accessible venue throughout, relaxed performance

7yrs+ workshop with Clare Pollard

Saturday 11th October

3:30 - 4:30pm

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For Winchester, home of the Round Table, we're offering a suitably Arthurian workshop for children 7–12yrs based on Clare Pollard’s middle-grade novel, The Untameables (Emma Press): a chance to write Anglo Saxon-style alliterative verse, create your own bestiary and puzzle over medieval riddle poems.

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Children must be accompanied by an adult at all times.

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Clare Pollard’s most recent books are the children’s novel The Untameables and the adult novel The Modern Fairies. She has published five collections of poetry with Bloodaxe, with her sixth, Lives of the Female Poets, forthcoming in 2025. Her poem Pollen was nominated for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. She is Winchester Poetry Festival’s current Artistic Director.

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Suitable for: 7-12yrs

Duration: 1 hour

Format: in-person workshop for children

Access: Relaxed performance, venue is up a flight of stairs.

Naush Sabah, Philip Terry

Saturday 11th October

4 - 5pm

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Modern Poetry in Translation celebrates its 60th anniversary with a reading by two poet-translators whose work has recently featured in the magazine.

Naush Sabah will perform translations of Arabic poet Al-Būșīrī, and Philip Terry from his version of Dante’s Purgatorio, before a conversation about the pleasures and challenges of experimental translation of classics.

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Philip Terry was born in Belfast, and is a poet and translator. The Penguin Book of Oulipo, which he edited, was published in Penguin Modern Classics in 2020, and Carcanet published his edition of Jean-Luc Champerret’s The Lascaux Notebooks, the first ever anthology of Ice Age poetry, in 2022. His version of Dante’s Purgatorio, relocated to Mersea Island in Essex, was published by Carcanet in October 2024.

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Naush Sabah is a writer, editor, and educator. She co-founded Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal where she is currently Editor and Publishing Director. She was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s 2021 Sky Arts Writers Award. Her debut pamphlet Litanies (Guillemot Press, 2021) was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Award in 2022.

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Modern Poetry in Translation was founded by Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort in 1965. It brings together the best new poetry, essays and reviews from around the world. It aims to give voice to the silenced, exiled and excluded, and create a diverse and creative community of translators, poets and readers.

 

Suitable for: all

Duration: 1 hour

Format: in person event. Poetry readings and conversation

Access: wheelchair accessible venue throughout

Joelle Taylor, Mary Jean Chan

Saturday 11th October

6 - 7:30pm

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An exclusive séance celebrating 10 years of Dead [Women] Poets Society, featuring two of the starriest, spookiest necromancers yet: Joelle Taylor and Mary Jean Chan.

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Join us as our resurrectors commune with the spirits of Adrienne Rich, the legendary lesbian poet and thinker, and Bing Xin 冰心, one of the most prolific Chinese women writers of the 20th century. We’ll hear more about their lives and works, and the influence they’ve had on our two living poets.

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We’ll also be treated to brand new work by Joelle Taylor and Mary Jean Chan, haunted by the ghosts of these two dead women poets.

 

Mary Jean Chan is the author of Flèche (Faber, 2019), which won the Costa Book Award for Poetry. Bright Fear (Faber, 2023), their second book, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. Chan co-edited 100 Queer Poems (Vintage, 2022) and is Departmental Lecturer in Poetry on the MSt in Creative Writing at Oxford.

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Joelle Taylor’s most recent collection C+NTO & Othered Poems won the 2021 T.S. Eliot Prize and the 2022 Polari Book Prize. Her novel The Night Alphabet was named both a Spectator and Guardian Book of the Year. Her collection Maryville will be published by Bloomsbury in 2025.

 

Dead [Women] Poets Society works with brilliant living women and non-binary writers to commune with women poets of the past. They run workshops and events celebrating our literary (great-great-) grandmothers, and host an online archive of all the writers they’ve resurrected.

 

Suitable for: all

Duration: 1.5 hours

Format: in person performance

Access: venue is wheelchair accessible throughout

Roy McFarlane, Randolph Matthews

Saturday 11th October

8:30 - 9:30pm

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Take Flight is an atmospheric journey through the tapestry of human experience, touching on themes of migration, social injustice, family, love and the human spirit, using loop sampler, vocal narrative and melodies covering a vast plethora of jazz and world music.

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This event is presented by National Canal Laureate, acclaimed writer and performer Roy McFarlane alongside world-class vocalist and composer Randolph Matthews, who has collaborated with luminaries like Herbie Hancock and Ed Sheeran. The show adapts poems from Roy McFarlane’s third poetry collection Living by Troubled Waters, and brings voice to the voiceless, praise to our ancestors and a celebration of hope.​

 

Roy McFarlane is a Poet and writer often known as “the voice”. Moving and mesmerising, he has performed across the UK with appearances in festivals, clubs and on the BBC. He’s the National Canal Laureate, a former Birmingham Poet Laureate, and one of the Bards of Brum, performing in the Opening Ceremony for Birmingham Commonwealth Games 2022. Take Flight is heavily influenced by his third collection Living by Troubled Waters (Nine Arches Press, 2022).

 

Randolph Matthews, a charismatic vocalist and composer with a 25-year career, infuses unique sophistication and elegance into his music. His velvety voice and mastery of solo looping create an ambiance of cinematic emotion. Matthews has performed at prestigious venues including Buckingham Palace and the Royal Albert Hall, captivating audiences with his diverse musical talents. Described by The Guardian as “vocally flawless, and world-class”, he’s collaborated with luminaries like Herbie Hancock and Ed Sheeran, leaving an indelible mark on the world of popular music and jazz.​

 

Suitable for: all

Duration: 1 hour

Format: in person

Access: BSL interpreted