Fife poetry festival announces 2021 line-up

The festival, which will next year take the form of a hybrid, digital event, will run from March 6-14 in St Andrews.

Festival director Eleanor Livingstone said: “It’s always a pleasure to reveal the core programme for each StAnza festival but this year it is especially so against the backdrop of Covid-19 and the challenging time it has been for the cultural sector.

“Many of our counterparts have seen events cancelled so we are thrilled to be able to deliver StAnza next year in a hybrid format combining traditional festival favourites with new innovations to bring poetry to audiences through digital technology.”

The festival will open with a special online gala performance featuring a selection of headline poets reading and performing, intertwined with music, film and art.

This will launch the festival with a line-up including internationally acclaimed poets from all over the world. Among the headline voices performing at next year’s festival are Naomi Shihab Nye, winner of the Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement from the National Book Critics Circle, Raymond Antrobus, winner of the Ted Hughes Award for new work in poetry in 2019, and poet, playwright and translator Sasha Dugdale, a previous winner of the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem.

They will be joined by Imtiaz Dharker, winner of the Queen’s Gold Medal along with Tim Liardet, Desree, Maria Stepanova, Rab Wilson, Valzhyna Mort and Christopher Whyte. Other poets include Jonathan Edwards, Jennifer Wong, Inua Ellams, Nabin K. Chhetri and many more.

StAnza traditionally focuses on two themes which interweave with each other to give each annual festival its own unique flavour. Next year’s themes are ‘Make It New’ and ‘No Rhyme nor Reason’.

In recent years StAnza has introduced a dedicated language focus to the festival programme. As 2021 is the 30th anniversary of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the translated language focus, ‘Beyond the Iron Curtain’, will be on languages from the former Eastern Bloc.