Latest News

The deadline for applying for one of our three Bursary places is midnight tonight! Two places available for a low-income writer and one available for a writer who identifies as disabled. Please [...]

We have a rather exciting and uplifting update to our Opening Doors Project. The poet Christine Webb has offered to provide financial assistance to support a third writer in accessing the [...]

  Here at Kendal Poetry Festival headquarters, we have been plotting and planning - please read on for information about our new project - and spread the word to anyone you know [...]

We are really excited to reveal our line up for the 2018 Kendal Poetry Festival. We enjoyed ourselves so much last year we decided to add an extra night! On Thursday 6th February we are running a [...]

It’s been a while, but the team behind Kendal Poetry Festival (ie Pauline and I) have quietly yet frantically been working away behind the scenes. We’ve spent the last few months [...]

  We’re really excited to announce we have a date for the 2018 Kendal Poetry Festival - so please pencil it into your diaries! Subject to funding, the festival will be taking [...]

  The Kendal Poetry festival has drawn to a close for another year, and what a festival it was. We had poets who are at the top of their game come to Kendal and deliver bold and touching [...]

This is our last ‘Five Minute Interview’ as we start to get too excited to do interviews, as the festival is only TWO DAYS AWAY! Hannah went to speak to Malcolm, the owner of [...]

Hannah Hodgson has been busy interviewing Mike Barlow, the editor and publisher of Wayleave Press. Mike will be appearing at the festival to be interviewed by one of our Festival Directors, Kim [...]

  Martin Kratz will be giving a whistle stop tour of some of our Festival Poets during his forty five minute session. He will be looking at the general themes that many of the poets explore [...]

We can’t quite believe that there are less than three weeks to go until this year’s festival. It doesn’t seem that long ago that Pauline and I were collapsing in a little heap [...]

    Below is a quick five minute interview with William Letford. I met William about a year ago at a writing residential that Kim Moore was running. I first discovered his work through [...]

HH: In one of my final five minute interviews, I talked to Linda Gregerson, an American poet. She is widely published with six collections of poetry and two of criticism. She has also won [...]

HH: I asked Kendal Poetry festival directors Kim Moore and Pauline Yarwood to take some time out from their busy schedules to answer some questions about what it is really like to start and run a [...]

Although tickets will be available up to and during the festival, our special offer of 10% off five or more tickets ends on May 6th in three days time! You can buy tickets for all of our events [...]

  Our next 5 Minute Interview with Festival poet Kathryn Maris, interviewed by our Young Blogger-in-Residence Hannah Hodgson   Kathryn Maris has two collections published. Her most [...]

Katrina Naomi (interviewed by Hannah Hodgson)   Katrina has a PHD in Creative Writing from Goldsmiths university. Her most recent collection, The way the Crocodile told me, was released by [...]

  Hannah Hodgson, our Young Blogger-in-Residence will be conducting a series of five minute interviews in the run up to the festival. Under the spotlight today is the fantastic Chrissy [...]

Our Young Poet-in-Residence this year is Florence Jones, one of the more ‘senior’ members of Dove Cottage Young Poets, in the last year of her A-Levels and getting ready to leave us [...]

This was us just a couple of weeks before last year’s festival. We look surprisingly relaxed and cheerful which is strange looking back, as I think we were both quite nervous about a) [...]

The 2017 Kendal Poetry Festival Dream Team We will be announcing details of workshops, talks, open mics and a more detailed programme very soon, but for now, please enjoy reading about our 2017 [...]

Pauline and I were really excited today to find out that the judges of the Cumbria Life Cultural Awards have chosen Kendal Poetry Festival to be one of their finalists for the ‘Festival of [...]

We’re really excited to announce that we’ve managed to secure part of the funding we need for the 2017 festival to take place from the Sir John Fisher Foundation and The Hadfield [...]

The 2016 Kendal Poetry Festival seems a long way away now. Pauline Yarwood and I had a fabulous and busy time putting the festival together. In fact we had such a good time, we only gave [...]

Ticket sales are going very well, and very fast! Quite a few events have sold out - the Friday night Main Reading with Helen Mort and Mir Mahfuz Ali, the Saturday Afternoon Main Reading [...]

We’re very happy to be sharing a poem from Fiona Sampson’s latest collection Coleshill, published by Chatto & Windus. We also took the opportunity to catch up with Fiona and ask [...]

  We are very excited today because the lovely Helen Mort has sent us two new poems from her forthcoming collection No Map Could Show Them. Helen will be launching her collection at the [...]

We were really excited today to learn that our Young Poet in Residence, Hannah Hodgson was a winner in the 15-18 category of the ‘Even it Up Poetry Challenge’, run by The Poetry [...]

When we applied for Arts Council funding last year, our venue, the Abbot Hall Art Gallery had a small cafe on site. However, Kendal suffered terribly in the floods, and the cafe at Abbot Hall [...]

Our programme went live just over a week ago, and we’ve been really pleased by the reaction and messages of support that we’ve received over the last week. Sales are going really [...]

For the past year, Pauline Yarwood and I have been plotting to put together Kendal’s first poetry festival. We’ve spent the year meeting at each other’s houses, making soup and cups of tea to [...]