TEIGNMOUTH POETRY FESTIVAL 2024
23rd & 24th MARCH
THE PAVILIONS, TEIGNMOUTH TQ14 8BG
Sat 23rd March
Pavilions Teignmouth – Auditorium
BOOK HERE
https://www.pavilionsteignmouth.org.uk/events/teignmouth-poetry-festival-2024-saturday
2.00 – 3.00 FREE ticket required
Poetry Open Mic
No advance booking – first come, first served. A chance to present your latest and finest to a friendly festival audience. Specially welcome will be poets who are visiting Teignmouth from elsewhere. Precise format and length of reading slots will depend upon numbers taking part.
MC Marc Woodward
3.30 – 4.30 £5.00
Poetry reading - Grizel Luttman-Johnson and Graeme Ryan Grizel Luttman-Johnson
grew up in Scotland with a lot of sheep and hills and praying. Now in Hartland she has swapped the sheep for bees, the hills for sea, and the prayer for breath. She remains an unrelenting artist, yogi and unschooled poet. She was amazed and delighted to win the Graham Burchell Award for Devon Poets in 2023.
Graeme Ryan, born in St Anne's on Sea, Lancashire. Graeme taught English and Drama in the SW for many years, and is author of seven full-length plays for young people including Heartland, Hope Street and Tracks of the Free. He won the Teignmouth Festival Open Poetry prize in 2018 and collaborated in The Poetry of Unknown Things in 2023. He is a co-chair of Fire River Poets based in Somerset and has read widely across the SW, most recently at Coleridge Cottage in Nether Stowey. His debut poetry collection Valley of the Kings was published in 2022.
Pavilions Teignmouth – Auditorium
BOOK HERE
https://www.pavilionsteignmouth.org.uk/events/teignmouth-poetry-festival-2024-saturday
2.00 – 3.00 FREE ticket required
Poetry Open Mic
No advance booking – first come, first served. A chance to present your latest and finest to a friendly festival audience. Specially welcome will be poets who are visiting Teignmouth from elsewhere. Precise format and length of reading slots will depend upon numbers taking part.
MC Marc Woodward
3.30 – 4.30 £5.00
Poetry reading - Grizel Luttman-Johnson and Graeme Ryan Grizel Luttman-Johnson
grew up in Scotland with a lot of sheep and hills and praying. Now in Hartland she has swapped the sheep for bees, the hills for sea, and the prayer for breath. She remains an unrelenting artist, yogi and unschooled poet. She was amazed and delighted to win the Graham Burchell Award for Devon Poets in 2023.
Graeme Ryan, born in St Anne's on Sea, Lancashire. Graeme taught English and Drama in the SW for many years, and is author of seven full-length plays for young people including Heartland, Hope Street and Tracks of the Free. He won the Teignmouth Festival Open Poetry prize in 2018 and collaborated in The Poetry of Unknown Things in 2023. He is a co-chair of Fire River Poets based in Somerset and has read widely across the SW, most recently at Coleridge Cottage in Nether Stowey. His debut poetry collection Valley of the Kings was published in 2022.
5.30 – 6.30 FREE ticket required
Competition Prizegiving
The top 6 successful poets in each category of the Teignmouth Poetry Festival Competition will read their poems and there’ll be adjudications from Open judge Malika Booker and Graeme Ryan, judge for the Graham Burchell Award for Devon Poets. Followed by prize presentations introduced by Virginia Griem and Ian Royce Chamberlain.
8.00 – 9.00 £10.00
Poetry Reading Malika Booker
Malika Booker is a British poet of Guyanese and Grenadian Parentage. She co-founded Malika’s Poetry Kitchen and is a lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. With Sharon Olds and Warsan Shire, Malika is published in the Penguin Modern Poets Series 3, Your Family: Your Body (2017). A Cave Canem Fellow and inaugural Poet in Residence at The Royal Shakespeare Company, she was awarded the Cholmondeley Award (2019) for her outstanding contribution to poetry and elected a Royal Society of Literature Fellow in 2022. Malika is the first woman to win the Forward Prize Best Single Poem twice, first in 2020 with her poem The Little Miracles, commissioned by and published in Magma 75 (2019), and in 2023 with Libation, published in The Poetry Review (2022).
PLEASE NOTE:
ALTHOUGH MALIKA'S WORKSHOP IS SOLD OUT, THERE ARE PLENTY OF TICKETS AVAILABLE FOR 'THE READING'.
Competition Prizegiving
The top 6 successful poets in each category of the Teignmouth Poetry Festival Competition will read their poems and there’ll be adjudications from Open judge Malika Booker and Graeme Ryan, judge for the Graham Burchell Award for Devon Poets. Followed by prize presentations introduced by Virginia Griem and Ian Royce Chamberlain.
8.00 – 9.00 £10.00
Poetry Reading Malika Booker
Malika Booker is a British poet of Guyanese and Grenadian Parentage. She co-founded Malika’s Poetry Kitchen and is a lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. With Sharon Olds and Warsan Shire, Malika is published in the Penguin Modern Poets Series 3, Your Family: Your Body (2017). A Cave Canem Fellow and inaugural Poet in Residence at The Royal Shakespeare Company, she was awarded the Cholmondeley Award (2019) for her outstanding contribution to poetry and elected a Royal Society of Literature Fellow in 2022. Malika is the first woman to win the Forward Prize Best Single Poem twice, first in 2020 with her poem The Little Miracles, commissioned by and published in Magma 75 (2019), and in 2023 with Libation, published in The Poetry Review (2022).
PLEASE NOTE:
ALTHOUGH MALIKA'S WORKSHOP IS SOLD OUT, THERE ARE PLENTY OF TICKETS AVAILABLE FOR 'THE READING'.
FESTIVAL WORKSHOPS
Pavilions Teignmouth - Studio
Sat 23rd March
10.30 – 1.00 £15.00
Poetry Workshop with Rosie Jackson
REVERSALS AND REPETITIONS
Inspired by prompts from poets as diverse as Kim Moore, Clare Shaw, Ocean Vuong, Benjamin Zephaniah and others, this workshop will explore and practise how to use changes of direction (the volta), as well as unifying rhythms of repetition (anaphora) to make your poems more dynamic, memorable and unpredictable. Rosie Jackson lives in Teignmouth. Widely published and commended in the National Poetry Competition 2022, her latest collection is Love Leans over the Table (2023). ‘a rare poet of transcendence’ Bel Mooney.
BOOK HERE
https://www.pavilionsteignmouth.org.uk/events/teignmouth-poetry-festival-2024-saturday
Sun 24th March
10.30 – 1.00 £15.00
Poetry Workshop with Malika Booker
The Butterfly in the Corner: revitalising old myths
Now it is a well-known fact that literature is constantly in conversation with other literary text in some shape or form. This workshop will exploit this tradition as the starting point for writing our own poems. We will turn up to the blank notebook page armed with material, that our imagination can translate, update, transform and in some cases give voice to silenced characters or even fill in gaps left out of the original text.
We will write a poem using a myth, folklore, fairy tale, fable, religious, and / or historical tale as a starting point. Your poem will be in conversation with an iconic, well known and influential text. Hopefully you will find it both fascinating and rewarding to reimagine a text that we know and love, in order to present another perspective.
Come to the workshop armed with a myth, fairy tale, folklore, religious and / or historical tale that has always fascinated you in some way or form to use for stimulus for the poem we will create.
BOOK HERE - almost sold out, check on website below
https://www.pavilionsteignmouth.org.uk/events/teignmouth-poetry-festival-sunday-workshop-led-malika-booker
ADVANCE BOOKING FOR WORKSHOPS IS ESSENTIAL
The TAAG Untamed Collaborative Anthology Exhibition is directly linked to the Teignmouth Poetry Festival 2024. It takes place from Saturday 23rd March to Thursday 28th March. It will be held in the TAAG Centre ExhibSpace 2. This is a short walk from the Pavilions Theatre. Here you will find Visual Images directly related to poems by South West poets. Throughout this week there will be readings by contributing poets of some of this work. See the Events page on this website for further details.