This year’s festival laureate is the phenomenal poet, Raymond Antrobus, whose debut collection The Perseverance won the 2019 Ted Hughes Award and the Rathbone Folio Prize for best work of literature in any genre.
As part of his laureateship, Raymond will present a newly commissioned poem at the festival, as well as visiting local secondary schools and taking part in a special event for Durham University students.
Raymond Antrobus is the author of two pamphlets, Shapes & Disfigurements and To Sweeten Bitter. His first full-length collection, The Perseverance, is a book of loss, contested language and praise, where elegies for the poet’s father sit alongside meditations on the D/deaf experience.
Introduced by Professor Stephen Regan, Durham University
In association with the Centre for Poetry and Poetics, Durham University