The Ledbury Festival

This week we celebrate the spirit of the Ledbury Poetry Festival. With a distinctly international programme, Ledbury is one of the best-loved events in the UK literary calendar. The festival has been, like many events, sadly cancelled this year. Ian McMillan is joined by Sandeep Parmar of the Ledbury Festival Board and just a few of the poets who would have appeared at the 2020 event; Carolyn Forché, Kaveh Akbar and Juana Adcock.

As part of the festival programme, Carolyn Forché was going to be in conversation with Sandeep, so here we give Sandeep a chance to ask just a few of the questions she wanted to ask. Carolyn has recently published her first collection of poetry in 17 years, 'In the Lateness of the World' (Bloodaxe). Juana Adcock discusses her translation of the Mexican poet Hubert Matiuwaa, and reads a poem from her collection 'Split' (Blue Diode), set to music by Jer Reid. Kaveh Akbar's debut collection 'Calling A Wolf A Wolf' was published to great acclaim in 2017, and here he reads work in progress. Sandeep Parmar has written the afterword to a new edition of Hope Mirrlees's ‘lost' modernist masterpiece 'Paris'.

The festival has been able to move a small number of events online, including Kaveh Akbar in conversation with Danez Smith and Juana Adock and Martha Sprackland will be taking part in a Spanish Poetry Translation Duel, posted by Clare Pollard.

For more details about Ledbury and to register for online events please visit https://www.poetry-festival.co.uk/

Presenter: Ian McMillan Producer: Jessica Treen