The European Poetry Festival is the biggest consistent celebration of continental poetry in the UK. For seven years as a festival, and a decade as an event series, over 1000 European poets have performed new collaborations across the British Isles. The festival celebrates, in the UK and beyond, the grand resurgence in avant-garde and literary poetry that has marked the 21st century across Europe and it aims to not only innovate what a live poetry experience might be, but to inculcate community and engagement between poets across the continent, as well as between new audiences and complex poetries. At the heart of this is our collaborative model, our Camarade events. Here pairs of poets, visiting or based in the UK, create brand new works for each event, free to create as they wish. Each event often features multiple pairings, and so our events become energised, engaging playgrounds for experimentation as well as friendships.
Our seventh festival takes place in summer 2024, June 19th to July 6th. Our sixth festival took place across spring 2023, with 15 events across the UK, witnessed by over 1000 people. www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/2023
As well as our unique festivals and our standalone Camarade events, the EPF has also curated events beyond the UK, with Camarade events in Kosice, Bergen, Vienna, Ljubljana and other cities across Europe. The EPF is a mode of literature, commissioned by festivals across Europe for it’s pioneering collaborative and commission events.
Supported by Arts Council England, National Centre for Writing, National Poetry Library Southbank Centre, Austrian Cultural Forum, Pro Helvetia, Latvian Literature, Flanders Literature, Institut Ramon Llull, Manchester Poetry Library, Nordic Culture Fund, London Bookfair, Kingston University and over 40 international agencies and organisations, the festival is now long established as a feature of the UK’s live poetry culture.
The EPF is designed to be a showcase of not only live literature - that is performances of poetry tailored to the event setting, and not simply recitals of that which is marked upon the page - but new writing methodologies, most notably, as mentioned, collaboration. The festival also seizes upon a resurgent and vital interest in European culture in the UK, post-Brexit. Vitally, it also engages poets who are often on the margins of their own nations poetry culture, precisely because their work is forward looking and challenging. The EPF aspires to be a space in which difficult, multifaceted, layered poetry is presented in an open, welcoming, generous environment. The festival is about innovation as well as community, in that the more hospitable the happening, the more challenging the work on display is free to be.
The festivals was founded and is directed by SJ Fowler www.stevenjfowler.com
On our festivals - The fifth festival in 2022 was the biggest to date, 14 events, taking place June 15th to July 9th 2022. The fourth happened across 2021, with summer and winter programs, working around the limitations of travel by presenting 12 events with over 100 poets, to great acclaim and enthusiasm from poets and audiences alike, returning to the live. The third festival was digital, presenting original new poetry films and long-form interviews in the year of the lockdowns. That followed the second European Poetry Festival, as the UK pretended to leave its own continent, nearly 1000 people witnessed 80 of Europe’s most innovative and dynamic literary and avant-garde poets come to London, Norwich, Manchester, and Kildare for 9 events over 11 days, creating over 100 new works of live literature. Click the links on the events here to watch all the performances and find out more.
The origins of the European / Nordic Poetry Festival events
European Poetry Festival emerges from over seven years of European focused collaborative and innovative live poetry events through The Enemies Project and the curatorial work of SJ Fowler. International exchanges between poets in the UK and poets from Romania, Norway, Iceland, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Austria, Italy, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Georgia, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Croatia as well as commissioned events from Southbank Centre, Ledbury Festival, Essex Book Festival, Milosz Festival and many others, led to cross-European collaborative events beginning in 2015.
Find out more and watch all the works made for these nights below:
