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Not that the dust has settled, we want to say a big thank you to everyone who joined us in person & online for Seren Cardiff Poetry Festival 2022! We hope you enjoyed the weekend.

We’d especially like to thank everyone who made the festival possible this year. Thanks to our media partners Culture Colony & AM for handling the online stream, and to Taz Rahman and the team at Just Another Poet for their fantastic reporting throughout the weekend (subscribe to the Just Another Poet Youtube channel to catch up on all the latest). We’d also like to thank our charity partners Daring to Dream.

Thanks must also go to our main sponsors The Rhys Davies Trust, and to the Learned Society of Wales for sponsoring the Meic Stephens Lecture, and Literature Wales for sponsoring our Published during the Pandemic events on Saturday and Sunday.

Thanks to our festival directors Rhian Edwards and Zoë Brigley for organising a fantastic programme, to the festival team for their hand work during the weekend, and of course to all of our performers.

Finally thanks to you our audience for supporting all of our events. We’d love to hear your feedback on your overall experience. Please let us know your thoughts by filling in our quick feedback questionnaire.

We are delighted to announce that Welsh charity Daring to Dream will be our 2022 charity partner.

Daring to Dream supports the emotional health and wellbeing of patients, aged 16 years and over, who are under the care of hospital clinics across Wales. They aspire to help patients dare to dream that their life can be full of colour and joy, despite the emotional and physical demands of living with chronic, serious or critical illness.

As a charity they work to raise awareness of the need for support of emotional health and wellbeing for all patients in Wales, provide that support through the creation of non-clinical ‘safe havens’ in hospitals for patients, their relatives and the staff who care for them, and through facilitating services and activities that support the wellbeing of patients (be they at home or in hospital).

This includes their annual online live-streamed festival Lleswyl, a music festival-at-home celebrating the importance of music to emotional health and wellbeing with a fun, joyous and emotionally uplifting event that everyone can share, including those not normally able to attend live gigs.

As our charity partner, Daring to Dream will be around at the festival talking about their work and how reading and writing can play a key role in boosting emotional wellbeing. We also hope to build relationships that may lead to our authors running events as part of the charity’s ongoing programme of activities in the future.

Daring to Dream’s Chair of Trustees Barbara Chidgey says: “Literature and creative writing can be very powerful tools to support and improve emotional health. A good story, told or written well, or an idea presented interestingly or even provocatively can spark the imagination and take us on a journey beyond our physical limitations. We look forward to working with Seren and its authors to deliver a lasting impact through words.”

As in previous years, the festival will be producing a pamphlet of the poems chosen by Leanne Woods in our Friday headline event Desert Island Poems. All proceeds from the sale of this pamphlet will be donated to Daring to Dream to support their work.

“With this year’s festival focussing on wellbeing, we’re looking forward to partnering with a charity for which this is a key focus. Reading and writing can be vital tools for taking care of our mental health. We look forward to seeing where this partnership takes us in the future.” – Sarah Johnson, Deputy Publisher.

For more information about the charity visit their website daringtodream.wales.