Summit Festival & Laurel Ceremony

The Laurel Prize Ceremony is happening at 5.30–6.30pm (BST) on Saturday 19 October, it will be a free live-streamed event. Please email us on [email protected] to register your interest for the live stream.

Summit: A Poetry School Festival is a landmark ecopoetry, nature, and climate writing festival, with its inaugural edition being a collaboration between Poetry School, University of Leeds Poetry Centre, National Landscapes, the Laurel Prize, the National Poetry Centre and Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

Summit’s ethos is centred around poetry, community, and action. It will provide a vital space to consider how words, and worlds, are deeply connected, and what role poetry plays as we face up to immense biodiversity losses, habitat destruction, rising carbon emissions and warming temperatures.

The inaugural edition of the event will bring together some of the UK’s most celebrated writers and ecological thinkers for two days of performances, workshops, poetry surgeries, and panel discussions. Summit takes place 19 and 20 October at Yorkshire Sculpture Park and the University of Leeds Poetry Centre, respectively.

Speakers include Rachael Allen, Simon Armitage, Khairani Barokka, Caroline Bird, Sean Borodale, Niall Campbell, Anthony Vahni Capildeo, J.R. Carpenter, Antony Dunn, Ella Duffy, Matthew Hollis, Matt Howard, Zaffar Kunial, Helen Mort, Caleb Parkin, Alycia Pirmohamed, Yvonne Reddick, John Wedgwood Clarke, and John Whale.

Tickets

Festival entry will be sold separately for Saturday 19 October and Sunday 20 October.

Tickets for the Saturday are sold through the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. A Saturday Festival Pass is £9.50 and includes access to all readings in YSP’s historic chapel, a family-friendly workshop with arts facilitator Nat Bellingham, and general entry into the park. In addition to the festival readings, we have 3 writing workshops available; get one workshop for £29.50 (includes general entry), or buy a Festival Pass for £55 which entitles you to up to all 3 workshops. Purchase your Saturday Festival Pass here and all other Saturday tickets here.

Tickets for the Sunday are sold through Poetry School. A Sunday Festival Pass is £10. Workshops are an additional £20. 1-2-1 Surgery slots are £105, and require work to be sent in advance, with 4–6 poems centred around an ecological theme.

Festival entry, on both days, includes automatic entry into readings and panel discussions. Workshops and surgeries are sold at additional cost, and should be booked in advance.

Saturday 19 October Programme

Workshop 1: Starting to Write Nature Poetry

Hayloft, 10.30am – 12pm
Capacity: 14
£29.50 inc. YSP entry, or £55 for Saturday Workshop Pass

You already see the world in ways that nobody else can. Find out how naturally poetry can come to you in a series of fun, informal games and group conversations with Antony Dunn. This workshop will help you transform what you see into pieces of creative writing, and send you off with skills and techniques to practise later. It’s not school. It’s not a lesson. It’s play with a purpose.

Family Poetry at the Park

Chapel, 11.30am – 12.30pm
Capacity: Uncapped
Open all ages; free with YSP entry

Join YSP favourite Natalie Bellingham for this family friendly session, using nature’s wonders to explore the power of words. Expect poetry, laughter, and lots of joining in.

Reading 1: Cyclical Worlds

Chapel, 1 – 2pm
Capacity: 50
Free with YSP entry

In this seasonal performance, one month post-equinox, we solidify our place within the choreography of the autumn landscape. Featuring readings from Ella Duffy, with Greencombe, a meditation on a woodland garden of mazy paths, and Matthew Hollis, with Leaves, a long poem which holds loss and grief in one hand; new life in the other. Hosted by Sara Hudston, Editor of Hazel Press.

Workshop 2: Petro-Politics

Hayloft 1–2.30pm
Capacity: 14
£29.50 inc. YSP entry, or £55 for Saturday Workshop Pass

Yvonne Reddick leads a generative and informed writing workshop centred on the creation of petro-poetry. Attendees will consider the way oil intrinsically shapes and informs modern life, and what we can do to find climate-positive forms of energy. Learn how to write about the power and perils of petroleum, and equip yourself with knowledge about the substance that fuels our society.

Reading 2: Laurel Longlist with Caroline Bird

Chapel 3.30–4.30pm
Capacity: 50
Free with YSP entry

Introduced by a performance from Laurel Judge Caroline Bird, the iconic YSP Chapel plays host to the 2024 Laurel Prize longlist. During the hour, we will hear excerpts from the year’s most innovative and thought-provoking ecopoetic collections: books that explore the extent of the living world and its complex interconnected relationships, as well as the integral interplay between literature and activism.

Workshop 3: Mingling Bodies

Workshop 3: Mingling Bodies
Hayloft 3.45–5.15pm
Capacity: 14
£29.50 inc. YSP entry, or £55 for Saturday Workshop Pass

Caleb Parkin’s poetic ethos is centred around inviting a reflexive, embodied and sensuous re-engagement with environment. In this seriously playful workshop, we meet around an otherworldly pool to ‘contaminate’ each other’s writing. Here, we unsettle individual and collective authorship by plunging into poems. We will look at watery and pondy poems, which play with scale and weirdness, to manifest otherworldly vibes.

Laurel Ceremony

Auditorium, 5.30–6.30pm
Free live-streamed event

The Laurel Prize awards collections of nature and environmental poetry that highlight the climate crisis and raise awareness of global ecological issues. In this ceremony, the winners of the 2024 prize will be announced, including First, Second, and Third Prizes, as well as awards for Best UK First collection and Best International First Collection. Chaired by Mona Arshi, Simon Armitage, Caroline Bird, and Nick Barley. Please email us on [email protected] to register your interest for the live stream.

Tickets for the Saturday are sold through the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. A Saturday Festival Pass is £9.50 (the equivalent cost of entry into the park). Workshops are an additional £20. For access to all readings and workshops, tickets are £55. Purchase your Saturday Festival Pass here.

Sunday 20 October Programme

Summit Festival Day 2 in Leeds City Centre

Festival Hub
House 10, Cavendish Road, 10am – 6pm
Festival Ticket £10, includes all readings

Leeds’ School of English plays host to the second day of Summit, with the festival hub located in House 10, Cavendish Road. All workshops and surgeries will take place in the same building. Poetry Book Society will be in attendance all day, both in the Douglas Jefferson Room, behind the School of English foyer, and in the Workshop Theatre (adjacent to Cavendish Road).

Book your festival pass here.

Through the Cracks: A Workshop with Caroline Bird

House 10, Alumni Room, 10–11.30am
Capacity: 20
Tickets: £20

Sometimes it’s hard to write surrealism when the world keeps writing it for us. How can we be playful when the stakes are so high? How can we generate ideas in a landscape of crisis? Caroline Bird will approach the task of writing a burning world with wonder, weirdness, gallows humour and, if we’re lucky, a little bit of hope. This session is centred on continuing to create, cultivating poems that might burst up through the cracks.

Book your session here.

1-2-1 Poetry Surgeries

House 10, 10–11.50am
Capacity: 4
Sessions £105 each

In these focused and personalised sessions, hosted by John Whale and Matt Howard, attendees will be given feedback on their poems-in-progress, discussing the page as a space for understanding ecology and the environment. These surgeries are a unique opportunity to gain specialised editorial feedback.

Book your session here.

Climate Summit

Workshop Theatre, 12–1pm
Free with Sunday festival pass

In this opening event, Simon Armitage will read a selection of recent poems alongside a winner of the Laurel Prize. Both poets will be in conversation with Emma Trott, Convenor of the Environmental Humanities Group, University of Leeds, as we consider the role of poetry, and the arts, and what it means to create amidst global emergency.

Panel 1: Blue Poetics

Workshop Theatre, 1.30–2.30pm
Free with Sunday festival pass

Exploring the hydrosphere – through oceans, lakes, and fog, island ecosystems, and field notes written with glaciologists – these readings study the connection between water and words, bodies in mercurial transformative states. With readings from Niall Campbell, Helen Mort, and Alycia Pirmohamed. Chaired by Jeremy Davies, Associate Professor of English, University of Leeds.

Panel 2: Geo, Eco, Topo

Workshop Theatre, 2.45–3.45pm
Free with Sunday festival pass

These readings will examine the relationship between physical geography and its literary representation, where poetry is a form of placemaking and spatial and temporal creation, a means of understanding our relationship to the Earth as home. With readings from Khairani Barokka, Sean Borodale, and JR Carpenter. Chaired by Fiona Becket, Professor of Contemporary Poetics, University of Leeds.

Panel 3: Toxic States

Workshop Theatre, 4–5pm
Free with Sunday festival pass

Centred on environmental damage, corrosion, pollution, consumption, and the materiality of human and more-than-human interactions, these readings will examine the extent of anthropogenic destruction and multi-species entanglement. Featuring Rachael Allen, Anthony Vahni Capildeo, and John Wedgwood Clarke. Chaired by David Higgins. Professor of Environmental Humanities, University of Leeds.

Evening Reception

House 10, Cavendish Road, 5–6pm
Free with Sunday festival pass

In this relaxed session, open to all attendees, we will be celebrating the close of the festival with a complimentary wine reception in the Douglas Jefferson Room.

National Poetry Centre Presents

Workshop Theatre, 6–7.15pm
Free with Sunday festival pass

Nick Barley, Director of the National Poetry Centre, and former Director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, closes out the Sunday with readings from T.S. Eliot Shortlisted poet, Zaffar Kunial, plus a headline poet to be announced in September.

Rubbish Words

Corn Exchange, Leeds, 18–20 October, 10am – 4pm
Free, open to public

Recycling is good for the planet. Being creative is good for your health. Rubbish Words presents an entertaining, immersive and life-enhancing poetry pop-up project for people of all ages. We’ll provide the (recycled) words: you cut them up in whatever way you like. Our team will work with you to help you create a poem of your own – and display it for others to read.

Accessibility

Summit Festival takes place in two different locations, with the Saturday running at Yorkshire Sculpture Park and the Sunday programme taking place in Leeds City Centre.

Yorkshire Sculpture Park (WF4 4JX / What 3 Words: hypnotist.stump.island) is a multi-venue site, with a mixture of modern and heritage buildings, and open parkland. There is a dedicated Quiet Space room in the Visitor Centre (just off the main concourse), which all Summit attendees would be able to access, alongside lots of quiet outdoor space surrounding the buildings where activities for the festival will take place. Full accessibility information for the park and the individual performance spaces utilised across the festival can be found here, alongside a detailed Accessibility Guide, which can be downloaded here.

Alongside the In-Person programming for the festival, the Laurel Prize-giving Ceremony will be accessible via a free digital live-stream on Saturday 19 October (5.30–6.30pm), which will also have BSL Interpretation. If you would like to register for this event, please email us on [email protected] and we can add you to the register.

If you have any specific queries about accessibility at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, or would like more information to support your visit, please get in touch with the YSP Visitor Experience team on 01924 832631 or [email protected], who will be happy to help.

The Sunday Programme will take place at either 10 Cavendish Road (LS2 9JT / What 3 Words: able.sculpture.soils), or the Leeds Workshop Theatre (LS2 9JT / What 3 Words: first.circle.indeed). AccessAble Guides for both of these spaces can be found via the links below:
https://www.accessable.co.uk/university-of-leeds/access-guides/workshop-theatre
https://www.accessable.co.uk/university-of-leeds/access-guides/school-of-english

If you have any specific questions about accessibility at these venues or need to discuss adjustments for any of the sessions across the whole festival, please don’t hesitate to email us on [email protected] and we’ll be happy to assist.

Speaker Biographies

Rachael Allen
Rachael Allen is the author of God Complex and Kingdomland, both published by Faber. She works as an editor and lecturer in London.

Simon Armitage
Simon Armitage is Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds. His numerous accolades include the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry and an Ivor Novello Award. His latest collection Blossomise was a Sunday Times bestseller. Armitage writes, records and performs with the band LYR. Never Good with Horses features his song lyrics. He also writes extensively for theatre, television and radio. He was elected Oxford Professor of Poetry (2015-2019). Simon Armitage is Poet Laureate.

Nick Barley
Nick Barley has recently been appointed as Director of the forthcoming National Poetry Centre in Leeds. He is also a Professor in Practice at Durham University. Nick was Director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival from 2009 until 2023. He chaired the judges for the 2017 International Booker Prize.

Khairani Barokka
Khairani Barokka is a writer, artist, and translator from Jakarta, and former Editor of Modern Poetry in Translation. Among her honours, she was an Associate Artist at the National Centre for Writing, and was shortlisted for the 2023 Asian Women of Achievement Awards. Okka’s work has been presented widely internationally, and centres disability justice as anticolonial praxis and environmental justice. Her latest books are Ultimatum Orangutan (Nine Arches), shortlisted for the 2022 Barbellion Prize, and 2024’s amuk (Nine Arches).

Nat Bellingham
Nat Bellingham is a freelance maker, performer, and creative facilitator. Born in South Africa, raised in Manchester, and now living in Wakefield, Nat works with adults, children, families and young people in visual arts. Nat continues to instigate projects, collaborate, mentor, and teach, alongside her practice. She has worked with YSP as an artist educator for over 12 years.

Caroline Bird
Caroline Bird’s selected poems, Rookie (2022), and The Air Year (2020) are two of Carcanet’s most popular books of the decade. She won the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2020, and has been shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize, the Costa Book Awards, the Ted Hughes Award, the Polari Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize. She won a Cholmondeley Award in 2023. Her latest collection, Ambush at Still Lake, was published in July 2024.

Sean Borodale
Sean Borodale has four collections of poetry published by Jonathan Cape, his debut Bee Journal was shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize and Costa Book Awards. He was a Granta New Poet in 2012 and is a Poetry Book Society Next Generation Poet. He has been Guest Artist at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam and Oscar Wilde Fellow at Trinity College Dublin. He is currently a Research Fellow at the Slade School of Fine Art, London.

Niall Campbell
Niall Campbell is a poet from the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. His first poetry collection, Moontide, was published by Bloodaxe Books and won the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award. Noctuary, his second collection, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. His new collection, The Island in the Sound, is published this year. He is editor of Poetry London.

Anthony Vahni Capildeo
Anthony V. Capildeo FRSL is a Trinidadian Scottish writer of poetry and non-fiction. Currently Writer in Residence and Professor at the University of York, their interests include silence, plurilingualism, place, memory, faith, and traditional masquerade. Capildeo’s ninth full-length book, Polkadot Wounds (Carcanet, 2024), had its in-person launch at the ALT book fringe in Edinburgh, in solidarity with calls for book workers to organize for a genocide-free, fossil fuel-free book industry.

J.R. Carpenter
J.R. Carpenter is an artist, writer, mudlarker, fossil hunter, and lecturer in Performance Writing in the School of English at University of Leeds. Her most recent poetry collection, The Pleasure of the Coast, was published by Pamenar Press in 2023. Her next collection, Measures of Weather, will be published by Shearsman Books in 2025.

Jeremy Davies
Jeremy Davies is an Associate Professor of English at the UnIversity of Leeds. He writes about British Romantic literature and environmental topics. His most recent book is The Birth of the Anthropocene (2016, University of California Press).

Ella Duffy
Ella is the author of New Hunger (The Poetry Business, 2020), Rootstalk (Hazel Press, 2020), and Greencombe (Hazel Press, 2024). Her work has appeared in The Poetry Review, The London Magazine, The Rialto, Ambit and Poetry Ireland Review, among others. She is the editor of botanical poetry anthology, Seeds & Roots (Hazel Press, 2022), and has been a guest editor for Butcher’s Dog and Magma.

Antony Dunn
Antony Dunn is a regular tutor for the Poetry School and the Arvon Foundation. He has published four collections of poetry, most recently Take This One to Bed (Valley Press). He has been Poet in Residence at the Ilkley Literature Festival, the University of York and, currently, the People Powered Press.

Matthew Hollis
Matthew Hollis is the author of Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas (2011), winner of the Costa Biography Award, and The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem (2022), a book of the year in the Financial Times, New Statesman and Sunday Times. Ground Water, a poetry collection, was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, 2004; Earth House was longlisted for the Laurel Prize for Poetry, 2023.

Matt Howard
Matt Howard is manager of the University of Leeds Poetry Centre. His first collection, Gall, was published by The Rialto in 2018 and was winner of the 2018 East Anglian Book Award for Poetry, shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Prize in 2019, and won Best First Collection in the inaugural Laurel Prize 2020. After eleven years working for the RSPB, Matt was Douglas Caster Fellow in Poetry at the University of Leeds from 2021-2023. His second collection, Broadlands, is published by Bloodaxe.

Sara Hudston
Sara Hudston runs Hazel Press, an independent publisher committed to producing short books using eco-aware methods and materials.
Sara is a writer, activist, and longstanding Guardian Country Diarist. Hazel Press, founded in 2020 by Daphne Astor, is named after the hazel tree, with its strongly rooted magical symbolism, poetic allusions, and practical uses; it publishes poetry, essays, and occasional short fiction.

Zaffar Kunial
Zaffar Kunial was born in Birmingham and lives in Hebden Bridge. He is a recipient of Yale University’s Windham-Campbell Prize and his first poetry collection, Us, published by Faber & Faber in 2018 appeared on a number of shortlists including the Costa Poetry Award and the T. S. Eliot Prize. His second collection, England’s Green, was The Times Poetry Book of the Year and was placed 2nd in the Laurel Prize for environmental or nature poetry.

Helen Mort
Helen Mort is an author from Sheffield. Her collections Division Street, No Map Could Show Them and The Illustrated Woman are published by Chatto & Windus. Her work has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize. She has also published a novel called Black Car Burning (2019) set in South Yorkshire, and her memoir A Line Above The Sky (Ebury, 2022) examines the relationship between mountains and motherhood. Her non-fiction work was awarded the Boardman Tasker Prize for mountain literature and the Banff Grand Prize in Canada. Her biography of the environmental campaigner Ethel Haythornthwaite was published in 2024. She’s a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Professor of Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Caleb Parkin
Caleb Parkin, Bristol City Poet 2020-22, has poems in The Guardian, The Rialto, numerous other journals, and was a guest on BBC Radio 4’s Poetry Please. His debut, This Fruiting Body (Nine Arches, 2021) was longlisted for the Laurel Prize. Mingle, his second collection, is out in October 2024. He tutors widely, holds an MSc in Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes, and is a PhD researcher at University of Exeter with RENEW Biodiversity.

Alycia Pirmohamed
Alycia Pirmohamed is the author of the poetry collection Another Way to Split Water (Polygon Books and YesYes Books). Her nonfiction debut A Beautiful and Vital Place won the 2023 Nan Shepherd Prize for nature writing and is forthcoming with Canongate. Alycia currently teaches on the Creative Writing master’s at the University of Cambridge.

Yvonne Reddick
Yvonne Reddick is a poet, nature writer and environmental filmmaker. She is the author of Burning Season (Bloodaxe), winner of the Laurel Prize for Best First UK Collection of Ecopoetry, and the scholarly books Ted Hughes: Environmentalist and Ecopoet and Anthropocene Poetry (Palgrave Macmillan.) She made the film Searching for Snow Hares, with filmmaker Aleks Domanski. She is currently working on a film about bees, pollinators, and the wonderful world of tiny creatures.

Emma Trott
Emma Trott is Lecturer in Contemporary Literature at the University of Leeds, where her research crosses over between the environmental humanities and medical humanities, with particular interests in literary representations of plants and animals, creative encounters with the heart, and language in medicine. Her study of contemporary British ecopoetics is forthcoming next year from Routledge.

John Wedgwood Clarke
John Wedgwood Clarke is professor in poetry at the University of Exeter. He has published three collections of poems, Ghost Pot (2013), Landfill (2017) and Boy Thing (2023). He regularly leads and collaborates on interdisciplinary projects funded by AHRC, NERC, ACE, Leverhulme, Natural England and others. His latest work focuses on the cultural significance of bogs and their ecological complexity. You can find out more about a recently completed project exploring legacy toxicity at www.redriverpoerty.com.

John Whale
John Whale is Director of the University of Leeds Poetry Centre. His two collections of poetry are Waterloo Teeth (2010) and Frieze (2015). The former was shortlisted for the Forward Best First Collection Award in 2010. He is managing editor of Stand magazine.

Festival Team & Partners

Simon Armitage
Poet Laureate

Nick Barley
Director, National Poetry Centre

Lusungu Chikamata
Finance and Operations Director, Poetry School

Ruth Colbridge
Communications and Media Manager, National Landscapes Association

Alex Hodby
Interim Head of Programme, Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Clare Matrynski
Engagement Manager, Priestley Centre

Matt Howard
Manager, University of Leeds Poetry Centre

Kerenza McClarnan
Arts Development Programme Manager, National Landscapes Association

Isy Mead
Artistic Director, Poetry School

Alice Mullen
Marketing Manager, Poetry Book Society

Sophie O’Neill
Managing Director, Inpress Books

Andy Parkes
Head of Programmes, Poetry School

Tara Pomery
Production Assistant, Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Kate Simpson
Festival Producer

Jasmine Ward
Marketing Manager, Poetry School

John Whale
Director, University of Leeds Poetry Centre