Bloodaxe Books at Ledbury Poetry 2026
Several Bloodaxe poets will be appearing at this year's Ledbury Poetry Festival, which is running from 26 June to 5 July 2026.
Priority tickets are on sale from 1st May, and general ticket sales open from 8th May. Details and booking links for all events can be found on the Ledbury Poetry website here.
Friday 26th June, 8pm
George Szirtes In Conversation With Peter Florence
Burgage Hall
Tickets: £14
Winner of the King’s Gold Medal, George Szirtes came to the UK from Hungary as a refugee aged 8. Today, he is one of the UK’s most respected poets, winning numerous prizes including the Man Booker International Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize, and the European Poetry Translation Prize. Prepare to feel moved by poetry of memory, displacement, and remarkable precision from one of the most compelling poets of our time.
Saturday 27th June, 10am
Workshop: Form and its Rooms with George Szirtes
The Victorian Room, Ledbury Library
Tickets: £26
What is the role of form, whether obvious or hidden, traditional, modern, or self-invented? This workshop with George Szirtes asks why we should have some awareness of form, what it does and how it helps us. Is it possible to work such lines into sequences that may resemble the rooms of a house so we pass through them as living habitations? Participants will try a few short set forms and one longer, while exploring the house of our experience and imagination through a brief sequence.
Sunday 28th June, 8.30pm
Tishani Doshi & Anthony Joseph
Market Theatre
Tickets: £14
Tishani Doshi and Anthony Joseph read from their striking new collections. Egrets, While War is Tishani Doshi’s fifth collection, offering a lyrical meditation on survival, war, ancestral memory, and environmental loss. Haunting the Black Air (Bloomsbury) by Anthony Joseph is a musically charged collection moving across cities and cultures, and across human emotion. Together, they trace how poetry moves between grief and joy, memory and resistance, and across landscapes both intimate and global.
Tishani will perform the new piece combining dance, poetry and moving image which she has created especially for Egrets, While War.
Tuesday 30th June, 8pm
History of the Child: Penelope Shuttle
Burgage Hall
Tickets: £14
Moving through childhood, grief, nature, and imagination in four interconnected sequences, Penelope Shuttle’s latest collection History of the Child moves from historical and mythic figures to intimate reflections on Shuttle’s own childhood. Shuttle will be reading a selection of poems from this powerful new collection and will be joined on stage in conversation with Neil Astley (editor and founder of Bloodaxe Books). Hold tight – foreboding, magic, history and humour abound.
Thursday 2nd July, 5.30pm
Ruth Fainlight: Reading and screening of Somewhere Else Entirely by Emily Anderson
Market Theatre
Tickets: £14
Acclaimed photographer Emily Andersen’s film portrait Somewhere Else Entirely offers an intimate exploration into life and work of American-born poet Ruth Fainlight. Capturing glimpses of Ruth at her home in London, on her walks, and visiting Brighton, this is a rare insight into the distinguished poet’s extraordinary life and career. Followed by a reading from Ruth, a Q&A with Emily Andersen.
Friday 3rd July, 4pm
Sarah Howe & Dfiza Benson
Burgage Hall
Tickets: £14
Join Dzifa Benson and Sarah Howe for a powerful pairing exploring inheritance, identity, and the architecture of memory. Dzifa Benson’s distinctive debut, Monster, offer a strikingly lyrical exploration of the Black female body as a site of repression and resistance, while Sarah Howe’s second collection, Foretokens, traces family, colonial legacy, language, and maternal inheritance. Blending fragments, monologues, theatrical devices, prose poems, and lyrical sequences, together their work showcases some of the most innovative, dynamic, and exciting poetry today.
Friday 3rd July, 8pm
Annmarie Ní Churreáin & Cathy Galvin
Burgage Hall
Tickets: £14 (£7 for Friends of Ledbury Poetry)
An evening exploring Ireland, identity, and the power of place. Irish poet Annemarie Ní Churreáin’s recent collection Hymn to All the Restless Girls offers lyrical acts of witness to histories of girlhood and resistance, steeped in folklore, superstitions, and the richness of Irish language. Cathy Galvin’s Ethnology: A Love Song for Connemara draws on the mystical cry for the dead of her Irish-speaking ancestors. Together, their work opens a dialogue between past and present, voice and land, in contemporary Irish poetry.
[05 May 2026]
