Who will be this year's best spoken word performer? Deadline nears for first round of Saboteur awards voting
Voting has opened in the first stage of the annual Saboteur awards, run by Sabotage Reviews, with nominations invited for such categories as best spoken word performer, best magazine, best literary festival, best poetry pamphlet, best spoken word regular night, best spoken word show, most innovative publisher, best reviewer of literature, best collaborative work, best anthology, and more.
The v...
31st March 2020
Susannah Hart wins £5,000 National Poetry Competition
Susannah Hart has won this year’s Poetry Society’s £5,000 National Poetry Competition with her poem ‘Reading the Safeguarding and Child Protection Policy’, it was announced tonight. Told in a single long sentence, the winning poem uses the dispassionate language of bureaucracy and policy to counterb...
30th March 2020
Arts Council England prepares £160m emergency funding package
Arts Council England (ACE) has announced that it is making £160 million of emergency funding available during the coronavirus crisis to “those organisations and individuals who will need it during thi...
26th March 2020
Sources of creativity: interviewer Andy N looks back at five years of podcasts
Poet and writer Andy N last week took part as a featured guest with his partner Amanda Steel in a virtual poetry open-mic night at Sale Write Out Loud. The technology didn’t phase him, since he has be...
25th March 2020
Sale Write Out Loud's virtual poetry night points the way forward
Open-mic poetry is adapting and reorganising as we all face up to the implications of the coronavirus crisis. Organisers at Sale Write Out Loud – forced to cancel their live night at the Waterside art...
24th March 2020
Laureate's 'Lockdown' poem on World Poetry Day refers to plague village
The poet laureate Simon Armitage has joined hundreds of other poets on Write Out Loud and on other social media in writing about the coronavirus pandemic. In ‘Lockdown’, a poem published today in The ...
21st March 2020
It's goodbye to poetry out loud for a while - and hello to online poetry initiatives
The poetry scene is coming to terms with the immediate effects and the implications of stark government advice to “avoid non-essential contact with others”, which will mean the cancellation of most if...
19th March 2020
Write Out Loud and coronavirus: Bolton, Marsden, Woking nights are cancelled
Three Write Out Loud open-mic poetry nights in March have been cancelled - at Bolton, Marsden, and Woking - as a result of coronavirus safety concerns. Cheltenham poetry festival - due to take place n...
14th March 2020
Plea to free Kurdish poet held in Turkish jail for 26 years
The plight of a Kurdish poet who has been in prison in Turkey for 26 years has been highlighted in a letter to the Guardian. The letter, signed by poets George Szirtes, Anne Stevenson, Ruth Padel, Gi...
14th March 2020
New York rhymes: journalists start their day with a poem
A recent revelation that hard-bitten journalists on the New York Times listen to a poem before discussing the daily news agenda has come as a bit of a surprise to those who don’t regard poetry and jou...
9th March 2020
MPs praise Tony Harrison in Commons motion
A number of MPs recently signed a Commons early day motion in support of the work of poet Tony Harrison. The motion was sponsored by six Labour MPs, and signed by a number of others. The motion says:
...3rd March 2020
Nicaragua's poet-priest Father Ernesto Cardenal dies aged 95
Father Ernesto Cardenal, a Nicaraguan poet, priest and political revolutionary, who opposed first the ruling Somoza family dynasty and later the leftwing Sandinista party that took its place, has died...
3rd March 2020
