Start your festival experience with an open mic event, hosted by Waterstones, Kendal.

£45 includes access to all events at the festival

Especially for our very youngest poetry audiences, Poetry Rhyme Time offers classic poems and rhyming stories for under 5s, their families and carers.

Join us in Kendal’s beautiful town centre library to read and discuss contemporary poetry in a friendly group environment.

Hafsah Aneela Bashir is an award winning writer and performance poet who will be reading from her debut collection, The Celox and the Clot

A Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellow, Jackie Hagan is a multi award winning playwright, poet and comedian and a council estate queer amputee.

This workshop will explore what happens when we let different voices into our writing.

Join us at this unique event for afternoon tea with a big helping of South Cumbria’s finest contemporary poetry

Everyone is welcome to the Festival Launch for a celebratory glass of wine, and the opportunity to meet our volunteers, readers, Festival Directors, invited guests and members of Brewery Poets.

Fire up your imagination and join us for a thrilling night of adventure

Moniza Alvi’s eight collections include The Country at My Shoulder (OUP, 1993) shortlisted for the Whitbread and the T.S. Eliot poetry prizes and At the Time of Partition (Bloodaxe, 2013) also shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.

Sat 20 Jun | 10am-1pm | £16.50 | Castle Room The art of listening…

Ian Humphrey’s first full-length collection Zebra (Nine Arches, 2019) takes in 1980’s gay culture and multi-racial heritage.

The blank page is a field of possibilities. But, let’s face it, it’s intimidating. How do we put those first lines down, in order to have something to work with?

Vahni Capildeo’s seven books and five pamphlets extend from prose poetry into immersive theatre.

Spark’s magic can transform anything. He’ll turn the bogeys up his nose into pink ribbons and bows. He’ll make a gorgeous high heeled shoe out of a pile of donkey poo. But terrible things have started to happen in his forest – wasps, werewolves, spells going disastrously wrong…

In The Queer Art of Failure (Duke University Press, 2011), Jack Halberstam argues that since success is always measured by patriarchal and heterosexual standards, the failure to live up to such norms can offer a new freedoms and possibilities

Fiona Benson’s latest collection Vertigo and Ghost (Jonathan Cape, 2019) won the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the Roehampton Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize.

Ann Grant returns with the Late Night Open Mic – a festival favourite, this year with the addition of guest poet Jackie Hagan.

Poetry is often most interesting when it lets go of the side of the pool. When the poem has to improvise to stay afloat. In those panicky moments the unconscious might express itself.

Mary Jean Chan’s first full-length collection Flèche (Faber and Faber 2019) was shortlisted for the Costa Book Awards for Poetry. Chan’s work explores themes of multilingualism, queerness, psychoanalysis and the complexities of maternal relationships.

Jonathan Davidson’s newly published collection, A Commonplace (Smith|Doorstop 2020), is unusual in containing not only his own work but also ‘guest poems’ by nearly a dozen other poets

Moniza Alvi has been drawn to the strangeness and clarity of Stevie Smith’s poetry for many years, and with her experience as a writer and the discovery of the full range of Smith’s poetry she increasingly appreciated it, and is now researching the poet’s life and work at UEA.

Vicki Feaver will be reading from her much anticipated fourth collection I Want! I Want! (Jonathan Cape, 2020). Her new work examines the voicelessness of girlhood and the fears of ageing with writing that is urgent, accessible and deeply moving.

‘Winning combinations are part of jazz history – Parker & Gillespie, Davis & Coltrane, Holiday & Young. Now we can add McAlmont & Webb to the list’

Tim Burgess is lead singer of one of the defining bands of the ’90s, The Charlatans.

A dynamic four-piece of fiddle, flute, guitar and percussion, Gnoss tackle energetic tune sets and driving folk song with a ‘maturity of ability many of a greater age will envy’.