The Leeds Poetry Festival runs from Monday 10th - Sunday 16th July, staging an amazing programme of poetry in the spectacular Left Bank. The full programme is here, including the second performance of the Poetry Supertram (containing 100% more Lionel Ritchie than our original performance at Chapel FM last year) with Joe Williams, William Thirsk Gaskill and Irene Lofthouse. Don’t miss Supertram on Sunday!
The annual competition anthology ‘Out of Time’ was launched on Monday 10th July, and I was delighted to have a poem on the longlist. The shortlisted poems we heard at the launch were all excellent, and I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the anthology; all the more so because the cover is stunning. It’s designed by Fran Haslam, whose work you can find on Etsy here.
Responding to the theme ‘Out of time’, the poem is an exploration of my family’s history through a single object - my granddad Harry’s wrist watch. The poem references his time as a printer at Waddingtons (we were never short of board games…), as well as the fact that his own grandfather had been a policeman in Leeds.
Congratulations to everyone in the anthology, and to the competition winners, and get down to Left Bank for the festival this week!