Unflinching poet Suzanna Fitzpatrick maps loss and grief
The launch of Suzanna Fitzpatrick’s debut full collection Crippled in London on Tuesday evening came with a trigger warning. The book explores a childhood shadowed by a mother’s chronic illness, culminating in a sequence of poems about death and the grieving process.
Suzanna said that if anyone in the audience who had recently suffered a family loss felt too affected by her poems they were free...
3rd July 2025
‘Reading poetry at an open-mic night changed my life!’
Heartening news about the healing power of open-mic poetry – something we at Write Out Loud have always evangelised about – has come in an article in the Guardian.
In a first-person piece in the newspaper’s life and style section Caroline Butterwick talks about how performing at the mic in Stoke-...
1st July 2025
Environment festival sees poets going wild about the planet
This was an eco-festival - with plenty of poetry - that put forward a positive view for the future of our world. Alnwick’s What a Wonderful World festival in Northumberland began on Thursday at Rothbu...
29th June 2025
Being Gemini: Marilyn Longstaff, Smokestack
Marilyn Longstaff lives in Darlington and is a member of Vane Women writing collective. In 2003, she received a Northern Promise Award from New Writing North, and her third poetry book Raiment (Smokes...
26th June 2025
National Poetry Competition is open for entries
The 2025 National Poetry Competition, run by the Poetry Society, is open for entries. This year’s judges are Denise Saul, Ian Duhig and Susannah Dickey. The first prize is £5,000. The entry fee is £8 ...
21st June 2025
A view of the bridge: the 'love-nest' cottage of Monica Jones and Philip Larkin
To Haydon Bridge in Northumberland, to find the cottage where the poet Philip Larkin and his long-time lover, Monica Jones, met four or five times a year – a place that is rather archly described as a...
17th June 2025
Minding her language: Scots poet Len Pennie speaks out
In her mid-20s, Len Pennie is already a poetry phenomenon. She became renowned on social media such as TikTok during lockdown for posting a "Scots word of the day" and poetry videos. Her debut collect...
14th June 2025
An Alphabet of Storms: Henry Normal, Flapjack Press
For two decades or more, the name Henry Normal was most often associated with an illustrious string of hit television comedies such as The Mrs Merton Show, The Royle Family, The Mighty Boosh and Gavin...
13th June 2025
Set in stone: words from three makars on Scottish Parliament's Canongate Wall
Words from three of Scotland’s leading poets have been unveiled on the Scottish Parliament’s Canongate Wall, on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile. Earlier this year, over 5,000 public votes were cast to choose w...
12th June 2025
Footballer-cricketers and other curiosities: the entertaining poetry world of Matthew Paul
I am an unashamed fan of Matthew Paul’s poetry – so to describe his second collection as long-awaited is no exaggeration, as far as I am concerned. I gladly undertook the train journey from Northumber...
9th June 2025
Mike Jenkins to judge Welsh poetry competition
Mike Jenkins will be judging the £500 Welsh poetry competition. The deadline is 29 June. More details
6th June 2025
Poets add voices to writers’ call for immediate Gaza ceasefire
Dozens of poets have added their names to a petition signed by 380 writers from England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, and ...
28th May 2025
Do the Locomotion! Novelist and poets mark Stockton & Darlington bicentenary
Poetry was the support act in Hexham on Saturday when novelist David Wiliams re-launched a novel he first published in 2012, to mark this year’s bicentenary of the Stockton & Darlington, the world’s f...
26th May 2025
Bringing it back home: local lad Simon Armitage gives Marsden fresh inspiration
The last few months have been a busy time for Young Write Out Loud. After our successful pedal-powered event in February at the Moonraking festival in Slaithwaite, West Yorkshire, we were busy prepari...
25th May 2025
Farewell to Barry Fantoni, creator of Private Eye’s EJ Thribb
Barry Fantoni, author, cartoonist, jazz musician, and creator of the satirical magazine Private Eye’s poet in residence, EJ Thribb, has died at his home in Turin at the age of 85.
As Wikipedia puts...
22nd May 2025
‘Let’s call a spud a spud’: poetry crowd-pleasers Henry Normal and Brian Bilston
Henry Normal is a stand-up comic supreme, who with fellow poet Brian Bilston, has been attracting bumper and appreciative audiences during the pair’s current tour.
He has maintained a prolific outp...
22nd May 2025
Di Slaney wins Write Out Loud’s ‘Echoes’ competition with ‘Dolly Parton’s wig’ - in memory of a ‘dear friend and inspiration’
Di Slaney has won Write Out Loud’s 20th anniversary ‘Echoes’ poetry competition with her poem ‘Dolly Parton’s wig’, written in memory of the late poet Kathryn Bevis, who died last year from cancer two...
22nd May 2025
Our team members: meet the folk behind the scenes at Write Out Loud
This is the first in a series - to mark our 20th anniversary year - where we go behind the scenes at Write Out Loud to meet those key players who work hard to keep our website ticking over. First up i...
22nd May 2025
Surge of sales as Welsh rivers anthology is launched
A publisher that produced a bestselling anthology about the main trunk road through Wales is launching a new collection of poems about Welsh rivers. Editors Sian Northey and Ness Owen, who put togethe...
21st May 2025
Oneironaut: Leah Larwood, Indigo Dreams
Leah Larwood is an award-winning poet, a freelance writer and a gestalt psychotherapist. She has an MA in creative writing and her poems have won or been placed in a number of poetry competitions. One...
20th May 2025
Meet Neil Astley, celebrated Bloodaxe editor - and our competition judge
Bloodaxe … what an arresting name for a poetry publisher. I may have first come across Neil Astley’s name when my wife gave me the second anthology in the Bloodaxe Staying Alive series, Being Alive, a...
15th May 2025
Pam Ayres, nation’s poetry sweetheart? For many, she still is!
When I retired from my newspaper job a dozen or so years ago, and was looking forward to pursuing my new life as a poet, of sorts, my colleagues gave me as one of my parting gifts a copy of the select...
15th May 2025
‘Lifelong republican’ Henry Normal turns down MBE - and tells his poetry audience why
The popular writer, comedian, poet and film and TV producer Henry Normal is turning down an MBE, he revealed to an audience at Whitley Bay during a performance last night. He made the announcement and...
9th May 2025
An evening of poetry and song with Vane Women in Darlington
Vane Women, a Darlington-based writing, performing and publishing collective formed in 1991, are staging an evening of poetry and song on Wednesday 14 May at 7pm at Vesuvio wine bar at Houndgate, Darl...
6th May 2025
Campaign to save Wordsworth home as museum after Rydal Mount goes up for sale
A campaign has been launched to preserve William Wordsworth’s family home at Rydal Mount in the Lake District, as a site of literary heritage. The poet lived there from 1813 to his death in 1850. It i...
4th May 2025
Carcanet poet Katherine Horrex is guest at Write Out Loud Bolton tonight
“This, you must know, is the growlery. When I am out of humour, I come and growl here.” - Charles Dickens, Bleak House
So you’ve been working your way up the greasy pole of qualifications to get to...
4th May 2025
Pam Ayres looks back and forward at Hexham book festival
There is plenty of poetry among the literary events at Hexham book festival in Northumberland next month. On Friday 9 May Pam Ayres will be talking about her new collection, Doggedly Onward: A Life In...
3rd May 2025
It's never too late! Graham Sherwood makes live poetry debut
A momentous occasion has taken place in the poetry realm, an event rarer than hen’s teeth. Write Out Loud ‘old timer’ Graham Sherwood took to the stage for the very first time at Waterstones in Milton...
28th April 2025
The Hawthorn Bride: Victoria Gatehouse, Indigo Dreams
Victoria Gatehouse is a zoologist, award-winning poet and children’s writer. Her poetry has been broadcast on BBC radio and published in several leading magazines. Her pamphlet The Mechanics of Love (...
27th April 2025
Pupils add voices in telling Marsden's story with Simon Armitage
In October last year a unique creative venture involving Marsden-born poet laureate Simon Armitage, his LYR band and Marsden Mechanics was launched. The project invited the people of Marsden to engage...
27th April 2025
Write Out Loud looks back … at the early days of lockdown. How did poets cope?
As part of our 20-year anniversary celebrations, Write Out Loud will be looking back at significant moments for us and the wider poetry world over the last two decades. They don’t come much more signi...
26th April 2025
Andy Porter looks forward to debut pamphlet
Write Out Loud regulars who have delighted in the entertaining and crafted poems of RA (Andy) Porter that have been posted here will be pleased to hear that his high-spirited verses have been spotted ...
14th April 2025
When Neruda arrived in search of Write Out Loud (in a manner of speaking)
The Write Out Loud team has perhaps been more focused on our 20th anniversary and fundraising poetry competition than the recent World Poetry Day. Mea culpa!
And yet we consider ourselves internat...
12th April 2025
Fiona Larkin wins National Poetry Competition
Fiona Larkin has won this year’s £5,000 National Poetry Competition with ‘Absence has a Grammar’, which was described by judges Romalyn Ante, John McAuliffe and Stephen Sexton as “very impressive, ing...
12th April 2025
This Transfigured Chapel of the Threads: Sarah Law, Resource Publications
This collection of one hundred short poems is inspired by the life of Carmelite nun Thérèse of Lisieux, who died in 1897 aged just 24. In her elegant introduction to the poems, Sarah Law explains how ...
11th April 2025
Caroline Bird Poetry Masterclass available to all
Following Anthony Anaxagorou's mind-stretching masterclass, re-released last week, we've now re-launched Caroline Bird's workshop, giving you a whole new set of challenges to stretch and stimulate you...
6th April 2025
Poetry Masterclass with Matt Abbott (available now!)
Third and final in our masterclass series, is Matt Abbott's workshop in which he provides a number of triggers for writing about personal history, ones that get attendees re inspired to jot down a fe...
31st March 2025
I Sing to the Greenhearts: Maggie Harris, Seren
Maggie Harris was born in Guyana and now lives in Broadstairs, Kent. She has won the Guyana Prize for Literature, was regional winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2014, and won the Wales Poet...
27th March 2025
