Contains Strong Language is the BBC’s annual celebration of poetry, performance and spoken word – and this year, it’s coming to Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture.

There’ll be four days of performances, readings, events and activities at venues across the city, and a host of BBC radio programmes wi...

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Write Out Loud is going to Morecambe poetry festival in September! To mark our regard for this fabulous festival combining top names and grassroots poets - and to celebrate our 20th anniversary year -...

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You’ve just read a brilliant poem. The language sparkled, the images lingered, the last line knocked the breath out of you. But 10 minutes later, you’re trying to tell someone about it and you’ve forg...

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I am standing in a ‘community hub’. This takes the form of a prefabricated, restyled chicken shed in the middle of a playing field in my home village of Great Barrow, near Chester. It is a lovely summ...

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Having been invited by Andy Croft to take part in the launch of Release the Sausages!: poems for Keir Starmer (Culture Matters), an anthology of poetry that contains no poems, I was curious as to what...

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I’ve come across some slim volumes of poetry in my time, but this one is ridiculous. Release the Sausages! Poems for Keir Starmer boasts 20-odd pages, but apart from a preface from Andy Croft, all of ...

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It’s not often that a letter is sent to a national newspaper in the form of a poem – even when it’s from a poet. But Blake Morrison chose to do so in a letter headed  ‘A compilation of terrorists’ – i...

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The deadline is nearing for Morecambe poetry festival’s competition, which is open to poets worldwide, for poems of no more than 50 lines on any subject. The winning poets will be invited to read thei...

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Raymond Antrobus and Zoë McWhinney have been shortlisted in the performance poem category for the 2025 Forward prizes, in the first year the prize has been open to poems performed in British Sign Lang...

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Five members of a school poetry club stood up and performed their poems on Thursday night at the launch of a pamphlet of their work at Alnwick’s Bailiffgate museum in Northumberland.

Dorit Greene, ...

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A poetry collection that has been said to confront experiences of abuse in a lesbian relationship as well as the relationship between a mother and daughter has won the Wales Book of the Year award for...

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Poetry doesn’t alter anything, right? As WH Auden more or less pronounced. In his foreword to Words on a NE Street, a remarkable anthology of 100 poems by 100 poets about the homeless, its instigator ...

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Fiona Benson will be judging this year’s £1,000 Winchester poetry prize. The deadline is 31 July. More details

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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...

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It’s 20 years since the passing of northern poetry legend Richard Henry McFarlane aka Hovis Presley, who died of a heart attack aged 44.  A unique talent straddling the worlds of stand-up, alternative...

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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...

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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, culmi...

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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 ne...

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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 ...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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Mike Jenkins will be judging the £500 Welsh poetry competition. The deadline is 29 June. More details

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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 ...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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