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Hwaet! is the opening line of Beowulf – meaning Listen Here! It is the title for the Ledbury Poetry Festival Anthology featuring 192 poets from all over the world who have performed at Ledbury since the Festival started 20 years ago. This is apt considering that for twenty years Ledbury Poetry Festival has invited audiences to listen to the best, the most exciting and the most promising international poets and performers. The Festival will launch with an anthology reading featuring poets including Ruth Padel, Daljit Nagra, Fleur Adcock, Festival poet in residence Jacob Polley and many more. The Festival line-up is lively and eclectic welcoming leading poets Carol Ann Duffy and James Fenton, Medbh McGuckian, Fiona Sampson, Penelope Shuttle, Frieda Hughes, Matthew Sweeney. Peter Tatchell, Eileen Atkins, Edmund de Waal will all share their ‘desert island poems’.

2016 features twin themes of Protest and Celebration. The Festival will turn a spotlight on South Africa, Iran, the refugee and migrant experience, celebrate Europe through poetry, create a wondercrump Roald Dahl celebration and audiences can revel in lots of events combining poetry and music.

Twenty years of Ledbury Poetry Festival is worth celebrating. The Festival will Wrap the Town in Poetry, fill the streets, cafes and pubs with minstrel poets, take over the Walled Garden for a day of Wondercrump Roald Dahl delights and there are loads of events featuring poetry and music – because you can’t have a party without music! Tongue Fu is a riotous experiment in poetry, music and improvisation. Poet-priest Malcolm Guite will offer a Poetry Breakfast with songs and sonnets celebrating people, love and loss, sorrow and joy. Hellens Manor is a glorious setting for two evenings of poetry and music. Scottish writer and singer-songwriter Gerda Stevenson and multi-instrumentalist Kyrre Slind. John Alder creates a live musical version of poems from Jacob Polley’s new book, Jackself. Punk ‘n’ Poetry features Jonny Fluffypunk and Spoz. Kathryn Williams will perform her album Hypoxia inspired by Sylvia Plath, in an evening that will also feature Hollie McNish, Harry Baker and Clayton Blizzard. Voices from the Cillín takes the secret/hidden burial places found throughout Ireland where thousands of unbaptised infants were buried secretly at night and is a collaborative installation featuring film, sound, poetry by Bríd Ní Mhόráin and music. The Book of Job: the Musical rollocks theology and death with music by The Indelicates and Radio DJ Nihal Arthanaike leads a Poetry and Rap workshop.

The Festival also proclaims itself proudly ‘in’ Europe with Versopolis: A Celebration of Emerging European Poets. Uniting 13 European Festivals to promote and translate their most exciting new poets. André Rudolph (Germany), Goran Čolakhodžić (Croatia), Monica Aasprong (Norway), Samantha Barendson (France) and Judith Nika Pfeifer (Austria) will share the stage with four of the UK Versopolis poets: Jonathan Edwards, Kim Moore, Daljit Nagra and Karen McCarthy Woolf. This event was one of the highlights of the 2015 Festival. These are strong performers, writing vivid and original poetry that opens windows and transcends borders.

The Festival’s South Africa spotlight features three female poets, Isobel Dixon, Gabeba Baderoon and Toni Stuart. Their poems illuminate different aspects of South Africa’s history, from the largely unknown story of a 17th century Khoi woman to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and explore “the fragile apparatus of identity on which we hang so much” (Gabeba Baderoon).

The Festival is partnering with English PEN for a second year to highlight the hundreds of writers around the world who are imprisoned, prosecuted, persecuted, attacked, threatened, forced into exile or even murdered as a result of their work. All the poets appearing at the Festival have been invited to partner with a poet at risk and read a poem by that poet at their event as an expression of solidarity. The poets are Ashraf Fayadh, Liu Xia, Mahvash Sabet and Amanuel Asrat.

The Poetry and Protest theme is explored through an Iranian poetry event conceived in response to the news that Fatemeh Ekhtesari and Mehdi Mousavi have been sentenced to 11.5 and 9 years in prison respectively and were also sentenced to 99 lashes each for shaking hands with members of the opposite sex at a poetry festival in Sweden. Empty chairs will be placed on stage for the two Iranian poets who are imprisoned and Athena Farrokhzad and Ziba Karbassi will read their own strong and vital poetry before a discussion on contemporary Iranian poetry and the fate of writers in Iran.

The Festival finale continues the Poetry and Protest theme with a focus on refugee and migrant experiences. Adnan al-Sayegh from Iraq, Athena Farrokhzad who was born in Iran and grew up in Sweden, Amir Darwish who was born in Aleppo in Syria and came to Britain as an asylum seeker in 2003 and Caroline Smith whose new collection The Immigration Handbook distils fifteen years experience and an Immigration and Asylum caseworker in Wembley. The final event Bards without Borders is a collective of poets speaking back to Shakespeare with newly written poems. Through readings and discussion these poets will shine a light on this crucial and urgent issue.

Neil Astley, Founder and Editor of Bloodaxe Books says, “This programme is very good, very lively and quite different with many unusual events.”

Chloe Garner, Festival Artistic Director, says, “Ledbury Poetry Festival’s founders knew how to put on a party. Twenty years later the party is still going strong. Poetry and music fill every venue in town, on the streets, in the parks – Ledbury continues to celebrate the vital and necessary art of poetry!”