Hwaet!: 20 Years of Ledbury Poetry Festival

Ledbury Poetry Festival celebrated its 20th birthday in July 2016. Britain’s biggest and liveliest poetry festival happens over ten days each July in the Herefordshire market town of Ledbury. Poets from all over the world join audiences drawn from near and far for an annual celebration of poetry in England’s rural heartland. There are live readings, performances, workshops, open mics, music, exhibitions, films, family events, schools visits, street happenings, a slam, a poetry competition, and much more. ’Hwaet!’ (rhyming with cat) is the opening word of the great Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf and other poems of that time. It means ’Listen!’ or ’How...’ or ’So...’ - a calling for attention. Which is what hundreds of poets have been saying, both in their work as well as in numerous, highly memorable readings to Ledbury audiences over 20 years. Mark Fisher was delighted to be asked to open the first Ledbury Poetry Festival in 1997 as Labour arts minister, and has maintained his support for the festival as an active Patron over many years. His anthology Hwaet! brings together 200 new poems by a wide range of poets who have delighted audiences at Ledbury Poetry Festival over 20 years as well as poems by some unforgettable visitors no longer with us who will always be remembered in Ledbury. Scattered between the poems are anecdotes contributed by poets and others offering a sense of the diverse flavour of an international poetry festival which is possibly unusual in being created, nurtured and loved by the community in which it is based. The poets saying ’Hwaet!’ include writers from all parts of Britain and Ireland, from North America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Australia and New Zealand. They include writers who’ve been poet-in-residence or worked on popular community and schools projects in Ledbury along with winners of the Ledbury Poetry Competition.

Mark Fisher was Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central from 1983 to 2010, becoming opposition spokesman on arts and media following the 1987 general election, and later Minister for the Arts in 1997-98 before his sacking by Tony Blair. In 1992 he introduced his Right to Know private member’s bill, the forerunner of the Freedom of Information Bill. He read English Literature at Cambridge, and before entering politics worked as a film producer and screenwriter, and from 1975 was principal of the Tattenhall Centre of Education in Cheshire, where Adrian Henri was Arts Council Poet in Residence (1979-81), succeeded by Liz Lochhead (1980-83)One of his first engagements as Arts Minister was to open the first Ledbury Poetry Festival in 1997, and he has maintained his support for the festival as an active Patron over many years, and latterly also as editor of the birthday anthology Hwaet! 20 Years of Ledbury Poetry Festival (Bloodaxe Books/Ledbury Poetry Festival, 2016). His other publications include Whose Cities (with Ursula Owen, Penguin Books, 1991), A New London (with Richard Rogers, Penguin Books, 1992) and Britain’s Best Museums and Galleries (Allen Lane, 2004). He lives in London.