LEDBURY Poetry Festival has announced its star-studded line-up for 2024.

The event - the biggest poetry festival in the UK - is set to feature award-winning poets, international voices, family favourites, music and dance.

Poets Fleur Adcock, Liz Berry, Imtiaz Dharker, Jackie Kay, Zaffar Kunial, Paul Muldoon and AE Stallings join Poet Laureate Simon Armitage headlining the Festival, which runs from Friday, June 28 to Sunday, July 7, 2024.

Paul Muldoon, prize-winning Irish poet makes an exclusive appearance, visiting from America where he is professor of Poetry at Princeton University and poetry editor at The New Yorker. He will give a series of writing workshops and public in conversation and reading events from his latest collection Howdie-Skelp.

Jackie Kay, former Makar of Scotland, will open the festival with a reading from her new collection May Day casting an eye of several decades of political activism.

A.E. Stallings, Oxford professor of poetry, combines classical allusion and form with contemporary themes and wit. She will read from her work and talk with The Telegraph Poetry Editor, Tristram Fane Saunders.

Liz Berry, winner of the 2024 Writer’s Prize for Home Child, a novel in verse inspired by the story of her great aunt sent to Canada to work as indentured servants, gives a performance accompanied on fiddle by Ruth Angell.

Imtiaz Dharker, winner of the Queen’s Medal for Poetry presents her new collection Shadow Reader with artist Clae Eastgate and will also share an “in conversation” event with Paul Muldoon.

Fleur Adcock, winner of the Queen’s Medal for Poetry, celebrated her 90th birthday with the publication of her Collected Poems. Her poised and ironic poems are known for their dry wit.

Zaffar Kunial’s debut collection Us was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. His latest collection England’s Green won the Ledbury Hellens Poetry Prize in 2023.

And to round off the Festival, Simon Armitage, the Poet Laureate, gives a reading from Blossomise, celebrating and lamenting the fizz and froth of the annual arrival of spring and this nervous marker of our vulnerable climate. 

There’s lots of music and performance to enjoy including Brian Bilston giving a performance from Days Like These; Roy McFarlane, Canal Laureate and performer, performing with Randolph Matthews adapting poems from McFarlane’s Living by Troubled Water’s bringing voice to the voiceless in celebration of hope, and Ledbury Choral Society presenting music by composers including Stanford, Vaughan Williams and Howells. A new work by composer Simon Perberdy has been especially commissioned for this concert.

There will also be a range of performance, workshops and events for young people of all ages and their families which will take place over both weekends of this summer’s Festival: June 29-30 and July 6 and 7. 

The festival is rounded off with an outdoor Celebration Day by The Master’s House packed with local food and drink and poetry and music.

Many events are live-streamed. Digital Pass Tickets allow access to events and the opportunity to join in asking questions. We’ll be sending out to digital pass holders ways in which you can create the Ledbury Poetry Festival atmosphere from home.

For all information and to explore the programmes please visit: www.ledburypoetry.org.uk