Due to a period of exciting change at Seren, the Seren Cardiff Poetry Festival will be taking a break in 2023.
The festival is run by the small team behind Welsh independent publisher Seren and arranging the festival each year is an enormous undertaking. Following the retirement of our long-term Publisher Mick Felton, Seren is currently in the process of appointing a new CEO and the Seren team are focused on working together on our forthcoming titles and annual publishing programme.
As a result, we have taken the difficult decision to postpone our 2023 festival. However, we won’t be going away completely, as we are still planning a small series of one-off events to keep us going until we announce our future plans.
Keep an eye on our website and the Seren social media channels for details of these events which will be announced very soon.
Thank you to all our followers for your continued support. We look forward to seeing you again very soon!
Following our incredibly successful third festival, we are delighted to share that we have funding to continue for another three years thanks to financial support from the Rhys Davies Trust.
The Rhys Davies Trust was established in 1991 with funds provided by Lewis Davies, the brother of the author. It seeks to foster Welsh writing in English, especially in the valleys of South Wales, and in the genres in which Rhys Davies wrote.
The Seren Cardiff Poetry Festival is one of five new Welsh-based client partners taken on by the Trust. Collectively these organisations provide a dynamic and innovative series of creative initiatives designed to celebrate the past of Wales’ long tradition of literary achievement through the medium of English and build towards its future.
Alongside the Seren Cardiff Poetry Festival, the new Rhys Davies Trust Client Partners are: Parthian Books, DylanED, the educational arm of the Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize, the South Wales Miners’ Library, and Literature Wales.
The creation of Rhys Davies Trust Client Partners represents the culmination of the Trust’s work over the past three decades. The work of Rhys Davies as well as his influence and interests will live on.
What this means for us
The Trust’s support will enable us to continue to present some of the best poetry in the world from a range of international poets bringing back to the capital a literary experience of a kind not seen since the Commonwealth Poetry Festival of 1965. Festival Director Amy Wack will take poetry lovers to places they have not been before. The festival will also include the new annual Meic Stephens Lecture on poetry begun in 2020 with a lecture on the career of renowned Welsh poet and documentary maker John Ormond. The 2021 Festival will also take poets into Cardiff schools as part of a programme of increased educational activity.
“We are incredibly grateful to the trust for supporting the festival and its growth over the next few years. We are excited to begin planning for 2021 and look forward to continuing to bring fantastic authors, and their poetry, to Cardiff from all over Wales, the UK and beyond.” – Amy Wack, Festival Director
