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 university, having left mainstream school at 13; you’ve met some inspirational teachers who recognise a deep and genuine interest in literature (you had read all of Larkin including the letters by th...
4th May 2025
Twenty years ago, did I imagine that Write Out Loud would still be here in 2025? No …!
Welcome to 2025 – and to Write Out Loud’s 20th anniversary as a poetry website! We have a number of things planned to commemorate this year, including a big new competition. We’ll be launching that - with full details of how to enter – in February. Meanwhile we thought it was time we caught up with ...
1st January 2025
‘Grief never goes away … it is almost as raw now as on the day it happened.’ A mother speaks about losing her son in Afghanistan
In this month of Remembrance, Write Out Loud is giving space to poet and peace campaigner Antony Owen, who has interviewed the mother of a British paratrooper killed on active service in Afghanistan i...
22nd November 2024
Accessibility? Must do better. Shaun Fallows looks back on his Arts Council-funded poetry tour
I could have kicked myself back in the summer when I realised I’d written the wrong date on the calendar for disabled poet and wheelchair user Shaun Fallows’ gig at the Poetry Jam in Durham. I’ve know...
12th November 2024
'We ride the electric horse without any reins': poet Shaun Fallows on disability and freedom
Shaun Fallows was born with cerebral palsy, and is a wheelchair user. Last year the Wigan-based poet appeared on a Channel 5 programme to talk about disability, and also published his first poetry col...
20th October 2024
Making live events happen: talking to musician, poet and community activist Elaine McGinty
Write Out Loud Woking relocated to a new live venue at the end of November. The Fiery Bird community arts and live music venue has opened up in a new ‘temporary’ home in Woking, thanks to the indefati...
30th November 2023
Get them roaring! How Lion of Newcastle rouses audiences
He strode confidently to the stage resplendent in striking African outfit that glowed in the semi-darkness. When he reached the microphone he exhorted The Stanza audience at North Shields & District M...
19th September 2023
‘I’ve loved being out and about’: why poetry’s mystery man Brian Bilston decided to take to the stage and meet his audience
Back in 2016, Write Out Loud interviewed the ‘poet laureate of Twitter’ Brian Bilston about his astounding success. In a wide-ranging interview we touched on why, at that time, he preferred to shroud ...
26th July 2023
A poem in place of a headstone: poet Andy Jackson talks about the Lonely Funeral project
Last month the first Lonely Funeral took place in the UK, when poet Andy Jackson read a specially-written poem at the Dundee graveside of a man called Derek, a former painter and decorator who had die...
21st June 2023
David Cooke looks back on poetry stops and starts as he unveils a bumper volume of poems
We at Write Out Loud have been lucky over the years to include the accomplished poet David Cooke as one of our number. David has regularly posted his poems on this site for well over a decade. Now upo...
25th April 2023
North Shields poet Dean Jolly nets rich harvest of words
A poet from North Shields has published three pamphlets of poems about his home town and the north-east coast in quick succession, to express how much the area holds a special place in his heart. Dean...
20th February 2023
'When the war started, I was distraught'
I interviewed the editor of Disbelief, Julia Nemirovskaya, by email about the anti-war anthology - about how it came about and evolved, the risks of speaking out, the dangers some writers still living...
23rd December 2022
‘There are not enough hours in the day to publish all the submissions that we like’
After starting out by running regular open-mic nights, Surrey-based independent poetry publishers Dempsey & Windle have published well over 100 poetry collections over the last five years (including t...
8th September 2022
From New York, to Chennai, to Bolton: George Wallace on global poetry networks, Walt Whitman, and a NYC anthology
George Wallace (pictured) is writer in residence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace, on Long Island, New York; first poet laureate of Suffolk County, Long Island; and author of 38 poetry books and chapboo...
5th April 2022
'Poets should never be lost for words': peace campaigner Antony Owen talks about the war in Ukraine and the new nuclear threat
President Putin’s barely-veiled threat at the start of the invasion of Ukraine to inflict a nuclear attack on the West if it took arms against him was a chilling reminder of the mortal danger hanging...
31st March 2022
‘I was too ill to write as normal, but the poems kept flowing’: Alwyn Marriage on her long battle with Covid, and the loss of a loved one
Alwyn Marriage is a much-published poet and novelist, and publisher, who last year found herself facing the “jaws of hell”. Her latest poetry collection Pandora’s Pandemic tells how she and her husban...
6th July 2021
'It's been a difficult time for everyone, but we're proud of our track record': Indigo's Ronnie Goodyer and Dawn Bauling
Publishers and partners Ronnie Goodyer and Dawn Bauling of Indigo Dreams recently notched up two more Saboteur indie awards - for most innovative publisher, and for best collaborative work for their j...
20th June 2021
‘The astonishing survival of the human spirit’: Jenny Mitchell's poetry on the history of enslavement
Jenny Mitchell’s prizewinning debut collection Her Lost Language was an exploration of the impact of British transatlantic enslavement on black lives and family dynamics. Her new collection Map of a P...
6th May 2021
Sarah Doyle on transforming Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal into poetry
Christmas Day this year will mark the 250th anniversary of Dorothy Wordsworth’s birth. The sister of William Wordsworth is perhaps best known for her journal observations about the daffodils they saw ...
24th April 2021
'A poetic Pepysian diary': veteran performer Nick Toczek has written a daily Covid poem during the pandemic
In mid-March veteran performance poet Nick Toczek started writing a poem a day about the pandemic – and he’s still writing them. He has already published one book of his poetic Pepysian diary of our m...
16th March 2021
Poetry in a family’s time of transition: how it helped Claire Dyer to embrace her child’s gender journey
Claire Dyer is a poet, novelist, and mother. Her new poetry collection Yield is about her child transitioning from son to daughter, and traces the process in which she moved from grief to understandin...
16th March 2021
From Coventry, to Hiroshima, and on to Dresden: Write Out Loud interviews Antony R Owen
Antony Owen is a poet of war and peace, who posted poems on that subject on Write Out Loud more than a decade ago. He has gone on to publish several collections – including one, The Nagasaki Elder, th...
3rd March 2021
The poetry of football (2): website has been 'swapping shirts with Shakespeare' for over 20 years
The Football Poets website was set up in 2000, is still going strong, and now has close to 17,000 poems on its site. Write Out Loud talked to Crispin Thomas, a Forest Green Rovers/Chelsea fan who is p...
10th February 2021
'If I've made researches, I have to present information ... basically I'm a tireless Googler': Ira Lightman
The Australian newspaper reported Judith Beveridge as saying that “you speak as if the entire body and character of my work is made up of borrowings, but that is a minuscule fraction of my total outpu...
16th November 2020
How we brought more readers to poetry - Neil Astley on Bloodaxe’s Staying Alive series, and the new anthology
On National Poetry Day, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley launched Staying Human, the fourth in his hugely popular series of world poetry anthologies that began in 2002 with Staying Alive (sub-title: ‘real ...
14th October 2020
'I just wanted to do SOMETHING': why Luke Wright has been performing nightly during the lockdown
On a Monday night in mid-March when live events started being cancelled lock, stock, and barrel due to the coronavirus crisis, leading performance poet Luke Wright said on Twitter that he would be liv...
6th May 2020
‘As a mother, it's my job to tell these stories’: Louise Fazackerley
Wigan performance poet and BBC New Voices winner Louise Fazackerley has broken new ground with her poetry collection The Lolitas. Its subject matter includes sexual abuse and underage grooming, and it...
16th February 2020
'Our Romany culture will always survive': Raine Geoghegan
Late last year Raine Geoghegan launched a second pamphlet of poetry that documents and celebrates her Romany heritage. Her family picked fruit, vegetables and hops in Herefordshire and Kent, and many ...
13th January 2020
How Andy Jackson's 'Otwituaries' provide special send-off
A few weeks ago I was saddened to hear of the death of one of my great sporting heroes, the former England Test cricketer Bob Willis. But the sadness was lifted to some degree – even though I blubbed ...
1st January 2020
Poetry map's 2,000 poems, and still counting ...
A project aimed at creating a poetry map of England and Wales has seen almost 2,000 poems posted in its first month. The four-month Places of Poetry project, which was launched at the beginning of Jun...
8th July 2019
'I believe that poetry can help in so many ways with good mental health': Emergency Poet Deborah Alma
The Emergency Poet Deborah Alma – who dispenses poetic remedies from her special ambulance – plans to park her much-travelled vehicle and set up a permanent poetry pharmacy in a former ironmonger’s sh...
25th February 2019
'I'm a big fan of sci-fi poems': WoLF competition winner Rachel Plummer
The winner of this year’s Wolverhampton literature festival (WoLF) poetry competition, Rachel Plummer - pictured at the awards ceremony - has a background in nuclear astrophysics, and has written a se...
17th February 2018
National Gallery, Picturehouse, LSE: but who are the poets on the picket line?
While visiting the Poetry Book Fair in London’s Conway Hall last month, we bumped into poet Grim Chip, pictured, one of the driving forces behind Picket Line Poets. Write Out Loud is always interested...
31st October 2017
'The more painful and scary to write ... the more important it is to communicate' - Henry Normal
The writer, poet, TV and film producer Henry Normal – the man behind Mrs Merton, The Royle Family, Gavin and Stacey, The Mighty Boosh, and Alan Partridge, to name but a few - has launched his first ne...
12th October 2017
'Why Marsden is important to me': poet tells of inspirational backdrop
Poet and painter David Coldwell is launching his debut poetry collection, Flowers by the Road, on Wednesday 8 February at Marsden library. In an interview with Write Out Loud David, a regular reader a...
21st July 2017
The poetry of conflict: Clare Mulley on clashes that shaped England's history
London Laureate and poetry journalist Clare Mulley recently became the first poet in residence at the UK Battlefields Trust, and will be reading from the resulting collection at the Albion Beatnik boo...
20th April 2017
Poetry in the round: how Pitt, Pottinger and Purshouse plotted show at the pub
Wolverhampton poets Dave Pitt, Steve Pottinger, and Emma Purshouse have joined forces to create a new show - Poets, Prattlers, and Pandemonialists - which will show at the Arena theatre in their home ...
10th April 2017
'I like to make people smile': Win Saha, still performing her poetry aged 93
Wolverhampton-based poet Win Saha is still writing and performing at the age of 93. In an interview with Emma Purshouse she tells of meeting Mae West and Paul Robeson, some poetry advice she received ...
29th March 2017
