The Region and its History
Sean O’Brien.
Poetry has always belonged to the North-East.
From the Venerable Bede writing in Jarrow in the 8th century, to the Border Ballads echoing across Northumberland, to the industrial working-class verse that gave voice to generations of miners, shipbuilders, and steelworkers — this region has never stopped finding poetry in its landscape, its labour, and its people.
Poetry has been at the heart of the North-East for over a thousand years, and Newcastle Poetry Festival is proud to be carrying that banner.
The modern chapter of that story began in 1964, when Tom and Connie Pickard founded the Morden Tower, which transformed a medieval city wall turret into one of the most celebrated poetry venues in the world. Allen Ginsberg read there. So did Basil Bunting, Stevie Smith, and Seamus Heaney. For a generation of poetry lovers, Newcastle wasn't just on the map — it was the map.
That energy continued. Bloodaxe Books, founded in Newcastle in 1978, went on to become the most important and influential independent poetry publisher in the UK, bringing vital and challenging voices into print for nearly five decades. The Northern Arts Literary Fellowship, first held by Tony Harrison in 1967, drew poets to the region who put down roots and made it home — among them Sean O'Brien, Anne Stevenson, W.N. Herbert, and Colette Bryce. And when the Poetry Book Society, founded by T.S. Eliot, relocated to Newcastle in 2016, it felt less like a move and more like a homecoming.
Newcastle Poetry Festival was founded in 2015, growing out of The Poetics of the Archive, a research project funded by the AHRC and led by Professor Linda Anderson at Newcastle University. The project catalogued and part-digitised the Bloodaxe Archive and pioneered new creative engagements with it through digital text mining, inspiring fresh work by poets and artists. The festival was its living culmination.
In the decade since, Newcastle Poetry Festival has brought poets from across the world to read, perform, run workshops, and collaborate on interdisciplinary projects, establishing itself as one of the most significant and exciting poetry festivals in the UK. In 2024, it ran a landmark event welcoming a new generation into the history of the Morden Tower, ensuring that the threads connecting past and present remain alive and creative.
This is not a festival that arrived from nowhere. It is the latest expression of something deep and continuous, a region that has always known what poetry is for.
Carol Ann Duffy and Imtiaz Dharker.
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