World’s best poets to speak at fifth Newcastle Poetry Festival

Published on: 5 April 2019

Terrance Hayes, Mary Ruefle, Adelaide Ivánova and Ishion Hutchinson, are among those taking part in the annual event which runs from 1 to 4 May.

Borders and boundaries

Borders and transformations are the themes of this year’s Newcastle Poetry Festival.

Once again, the best international poets will be heading to Tyneside to read from their work, hold workshops and collaborate in exciting new ventures. Festival director Professor Sinéad Morrissey said: “It’s going to be the best Newcastle Poetry Festival yet. We can’t wait to welcome you.”

This year, the festival is celebrating Transformations, in particular, exploring poetry as a site of change through the work of artists from all over the world whose practice challenges borders and boundaries.

Highlights

Highlights for this year’s event include:

• Festival launch with Terrance Hayes, whose American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Poetry. This collection considers America’s contemporary moment, its gun violence, racism, and the rise of its current President, through the lens of the sonnet form.

• Festival lecture by Jamaican poet Ishion Hutchinson on the 19th-Century social reformer, activist, and former slave, Frederick Douglass, who visited Newcastle in 1846.

• Readings by renowned US poet Mary Ruefle, on a rare visit to the UK to discuss her ground-breaking experimental work

• A dramatic re-enactment of the life of the great German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht with poet David Constantine and soprano Sarah Gabriel

• TS Eliot Prize awardee Hannah Sullivan who will be reading from her winning collection, Three Poems (Faber & Faber, 2018)

• Phoebe Power, winner of this year’s Forward Prize for Best First Collection with her debut Shrines of Upper Austria (Carcanet, 2018).

• The Northern Poetry Symposium Inter/Play, exploring poetry’s intersections with visual art, the digital and the body, on 2 May at Sage Gateshead

• Prizegiving of the inaugural Newcastle Poetry Competition

• PLUS films, digital sound installations, newly-commissioned prints, and more

Exciting times

“These are exciting times for poetry and our festival this year fully reflects the range and excellence of poetry being written all over the world,” said Professor Morrissey.

The Newcastle Poetry Festival is the only one held between Birmingham and St Andrews to focus solely on poetry and is the third largest poetry festival in the country.

It is organised by Newcastle University’s Centre for Literary Arts (NCLA), which is home to some of the best contemporary writers and poets working today. They include Professor Morrissey, who won the Forward Prize for her collection On Balance, TS Eliot Prize winner Professor Jacob Polley, and Professor Sean O’Brien, who became the first poet to win both prestigious prizes for the same collection in 2007.

Find out more and get tickets for events here.