As the Ted Hughes Poetry Festival has grown each year in scope and content, so has the art exhibition, an integral part of the main festival weekend. Starting three years ago with work from one art group based in Dolcliffe Hall in the town of Mexborough, it was expanded by invitation last year to a second […]
Blog
The Ted Hughes Poetry Festival
The third Ted Hughes Poetry Festival takes place over the weekend of 23-25 June 2017 with a varied and exciting programme of events in and around Mexborough, including readings and performances from award-winning poets Simon Armitage, Vahni Capildeo and Linton Kwesi Johnson. Festival booking is now open; click on the programme links below for full […]
Incendium Amoris | Steve Ely
Incendium Amoris (‘The Fire of Love’) take as its starting point the writings, life and landscape of the fourteenth century mystic Richard Rolle, ‘the hermit of Hampole’, containing responses to his writings, re-imagined vignettes from his biography and psycho-geographical transformations of his landscape — which is also the author’s landscape. The book’s Catholic vision is […]
A Living Notebook | Helen Mort
As a child, I used to make up stories on the walk to school from my house in North East Derbyshire. The landscape where I grew up was the kind of place Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts might have described as ‘Edgelands’: half rural, half ex-industrial. It was Dennis Skinner’s constituency, just along from […]
Well Spoken! | Mick Jenkinson
Well Spoken! is Doncaster’s monthly poetry performance evening, which I’ve been hosting at Doncaster Brewery and Tap for the past two and a half years. The format is an informal open mic session, with the occasional guest spot from a visiting published poet. I’d been attending a writers’ group in Doncaster led by Ray Hearne […]
Longbarrow Press showcase at Well Spoken! A review by Michèle Beck
On the 13th April 2017, the first fringe event for the upcoming Ted Hughes Poetry Festival was held with a poetry showcase, followed by an open mic from Well Spoken! hosted at Doncaster Brewery. The guest poets were introduced by Brian Lewis, founder editor of Sheffield-based publisher Longbarrow Press. The three poets who read were Matthew Clegg, Karl […]
Poetry and Birding walk and workshop
Here’s a selection of photos from Saturday’s Poetry Walk & Workshop at RSPB Old Moor with poet and birder John Whale. The weather was kind, as were the people. We hope to make more events like this in the future. See the Festival page for details of what’s coming up in June 2017.
The Ted Hughes Network | Steve Ely
In the summer of 2016 I was appointed Director of the Ted Hughes Network in the English Literature & Creative Writing Subject Area at the University of Huddersfield. The University is virtually equidistant from Hughes’s two major Yorkshire centres of Mytholmroyd and Mexborough, and is thus ideally located to become a hub for Hughes studies. […]
Poetry and Birding at RSPB Old Moor
Ahead of the main Ted Hughes Poetry Festival weekend (23 – 25 June 2017), we’ve programmed a series of one-off events that highlight our engagement with place. The first of these is a morning of birding and poetry at RSPB Old Moor on Saturday 20 May, with poet (‘Waterloo Teeth’, ‘Frieze’), Professor of Romantic Literature […]
‘Is That You, Father?’: Poetry Readings and the Power of Tone and Voice | Matthew Clegg
Years ago, I had a dream in which I was giving a poetry reading at my old middle school, and Ted Hughes was in the audience. He was a kind of shade, or revenant, come back from the dead – like a ghost out of Homer. The reading I was giving was fairly conventional. I’d […]
