Poetry
100 Poets:
Home curator project
The 100 Poets Project is an innovative component of the Ruthin International Arts Festival that intricately weaves poetry into the daily lives of Ruthin's residents, transforming personal spaces into interactive exhibition sites.
As part of this project, 100 beautifully designed poetry postcards, featuring works from poets across 35 countries, are being distributed to local families. These postcards serve not only as decor but also as a medium for personal interaction and artistic expression within the community.
Poetry and sounds night
Sunday 30 June
19:00
Participating poets:
Fiona Sampson, Sean O’Brien, W.N. Herbert, Yang Lian, Yu Er, Yo Yo, Meier, Glyn Edwards, Suzanne Iuppa, Patricia Sumner, Jonathan Mayman, Edmund Dixon, Lucy Butler, Claudi Piripippi, Jackie Montague, Leila Gamaz, Leaf Pettit, Diana Sanders
Sean O’Brien
Sean O’Brien’s eleventh collection of poems, Embark, was published by Picador in 2023. Other recent poetry publications include two pamphlets, Impasse: for Jules Maigret (Hercules Editions 2023) and Otherwise (Dare-Gale 2023). A twelfth full collection is forthcoming. His work has received awards including the T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes, and the Somerset Maugham and E.M Forster Awards. In 2021 he was awarded the Beijing Literature and Arts Network Award for Poetry. His own work has been widely translated. He has also translated the work of others, including Dante’s Inferno and the complete poems of the Kazakh national poet Abai Kunanbayuli, as well as plays by Aristophanes and Lope de Vega. He is a critic, anthologist and editor; a novelist and short story writer; a librettist and a playwright. He has worked with the Royal National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company with Live Theatre Newcastle and English National Opera. He is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
W.N. Herbert
W.N. Herbert was born in Dundee and lives in a lighthouse in North Shields. He is the author of 10 books of poetry and 2 collaborative volumes, mostly published by Bloodaxe Books, who brought out his latest full collection, The Wreck of the Fathership, in 2020. His most recent publication is Unselected Poems, with Smokestack Books (2024). He has collaborated on 7 books of translations from Bulgarian, Chinese, Farsi, and Somali, including, with Yang Lian, the anthologies Jade Ladder and The Third Shore. His most recent volume of translations is The Kindly Interrogator (Shearsman, 2021), done in collaboration with the author, Alireza Abiz. He is also a librettist and works with text in public art, principally on the Westpark development in Darlington. His work has been shortlisted for the T.S.Eliot, Saltire, and Forward Prizes, and has won numerous Arts Council awards and, in 2014, a Cholmondeley Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing at Newcastle University. He was the first Wordsworth Fellow at Grasmere, and was until recently Dundee’s first Makar, or city laureate.
Fiona Sampson
Fiona Sampson MBE is a poet, a literary biographer and a writer about place. Her most seventh and most recent poetry collection, Come Down (Hachette, 2021), received the Naim Frashëri Laureateship, European Lyric Atlas Prize, and Wales Poetry Book of the Year. Recipient of a Cholmondeley award, the Newdigate Prize, and multiple awards each from the Arts Councils of England and Wales, the Society of Authors, Arts and Humanities Research Council, and Poetry Book Society, she has been translated into 38 languages and received international honours in the US, Bosnia, India, France, Romania, Albania and North Macedonia. Her 24 books to date include the monographs Beyond the Lyric (Penguin 2012) and Lyric Cousins (2016), and she edited the Faber Percy Bysshe Shelley poet to poet. Her Limestone Country was Guardian nature writing book of the year. The critically acclaimed In Search of Mary Shelley was followed by Two-Way Mirror: Elizabeth Barrett Browning (2022), a New York Times Editors’ Choice, Washington Post Book of the Year, and a finalist for the Plutarch Prize and the PEN US International Biography Prize. Also a prolific critic, broadcaster and librettist, who collaborates frequently with musicians and visual artists, she edited the UK’s national periodical of record, Poetry Review, from 2005-12.
Yang Lian
Yang Lian was born in Switzerland in 1955, and grew up in Beijing. He began writing when he was sent to the countryside in the 1970s. He was among the “Misty School" of Poets in China. His poems became well-known and influential inside and outside of China in the 1980s, especially when his series ‘Norilang’ was published in 1983.
Yang Lian was invited to visit Australia and New Zealand in 1988 and next year, he became a poet in exile and started his journey around the globe since then. All these years, his literary writing, as well as his outspoken voice, has been called as a highly individual voice in world literature, politics and culture.
Yang Lian has published thirteen collections of poems, two collections of prose and one selection of essays in Chinese. His work has also been translated into more than twenty languages, including English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese and many Eastern European languages. Amongst 14 books of poems in English translation, his most representative works include the sequences and long poems such as Yi, Where the Sea Stands Still, Concentric Circles, Narrative Poem and Anniversary Snow…etc. they display a profound understanding of, and creative links with, Classical Chinese poetry.
Meier
Meier was born in Huai-An, Jiangsu Provence of China. She is a director of Twelve Behind International Festival. She has been hailed as one of the ten leading Chinese Woman poets. Through many years she has been awarded the 4th Long Poems Prize, the Poets Prize of the American Academy of Culture and Arts, the 57th Chinese Taiwan Literary Medal, the Gold Medal award for poetry of the 4th Eurasian Literary festival. Mei Er has published a few of poetry collection in Chinese include The Weight of Sponge, You and I and Twelve Back. Her poems have been translated and published over ten languages such as English, Spanish, Russian, German, Japanese, Hungarian, Mongolian, Persian ect.
Meier lives in London now. She continues to focus her time on education, culture exchange, tourism and regularly performs her poetry around the world.
Yu Er
Yu Er is a distinguished poet and cross-media creator. Her artistic approach draws inspiration from dance and extends into visual arts and poetic expression, exploring artistic boundaries through interdisciplinary methods.
As an established poet, Yu Er has actively participated in the "Beijing Poetry Festival" for nine years, where she received the "Golden Sunflower Award" at its seventh iteration and was elected chairperson of the festival's council in 2021. Internationally recognized, her work has been featured at the Havana International Poetry Festival and translated into English and Spanish. Yu Er's poetry collections include "Late Spring Autumn Colors" and "Under the Light." In 2024, she founded the Ruthin International Arts Festival in the UK, established the Y Arts Centre and launched the Y Talent Award, contributing significantly to the promotion of youth arts on a global scale.
Yo Yo
YoYo (Youhong Liu) is a fiction writer, a painter and a guest professor of Shantou University, Guangdong Province, China. She was born in the Western China, and worked as an arts editor in Chinese Theater Publishing House before left China at 1988. She started her literary writings after left China and published 9 collections of Novelettes and 1 Novel in China, Taiwan and overseas. Two of her fictions have been translated into English, which titled Ghost Tide published by Fourth Estate, part of HapperCollins (2005), it was reviewed as “a true literature” by the well-known Australian writer Nicolas Jose. The other was titled One Man’s Decision to Become a Tree published by PalmArtPress in Berlin, Germany (2023). YoYo has been a witness of the whole history of Contemporary Chinese literature since the begging of 1980s, her elegant and experimental works were inspired by the crazy but extremely complex Chinese reality. She is also a self-educated artist, her paintings were exhibited in many countries, such as UK, Germany, France, Italy, Poland, China……etc, and collected by hundreds of institutions and private people. She won the special prize for foreign artists in the 46th International arts exhibition in Sulmona, Italy in 2018. YoYo has been invited to many literary and arts foundations such like Berlin DAAD, Yaddo (USA) and Schloss Solitude (Germany). She has been teaching in Eton College in Windsor, SOAS of Uni. of London, University of Sydney and Auckland, New Zealand. She lives in Berlin and London as a free artist now.
Suzanne Iuppa
Suzanne Iuppa is a poet and conservationist living and working in the Dyfi Valley, mid Wales. Originally from America with Sicilian-Arabic roots, she came to the UK to study modern British poetry and later, Countryside Management. She's worked as a volunteer ranger in the Clwydian Mountains. Now a climate innovation strategist in Wales, her poems ("brilliantly strange" Voicebox) can be found in Magma, Ambit, Poetry Wales, Finished Creatures, Bad Lilies, berlin lit, Natur Cymru, Spelt and The Gingko Prize for Ecopoetry. Her writing is inspired by recovery work for our rarest species and adaptive, if unpredictable, futures. Suzanne has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, twice-nominated for the Pushcart Prize and is a Hay Festival Writer at Work 2024.
Glyn Edwards
Glyn Edwards is a poet and teacher. 'In Orbit' (Seren) is shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2024. He is the Writer-in-Residence at the North Wales Wildlife Trust and co-edits Modron, an online magazine of ecological and environmental writing. He has delivered courses for the Poetry School and Poetry Wales, and is a PhD researcher in Ecopoetry at Bangor University.
Leila Gamaz
Leila Gamaz is an Algerian-English artist who uses writing, film and archival research to share untold stories that create waymarkers for the diasporic journey of homecoming. This encompasses both the tangible and intangible memories held in species, landscapes and people. She ritualises and remembers our collective past, building upon it to imagine alternative futures.
Claudi Piripippi
Born in Germany and raised in Italy, my academic formation developed between Italy, the UK and the US but my cultural experience could not be complete without the knowledge gathered from nature and an itinerant lifestyle in the pursuit of art and love.
Since graduating from Suzanne Lacy’s Public Practice MFA programme, my work has taken a radical feminist turn leading into the meanders of my fluid-eco-glitch-femininity. Currently searching for possible connections between the conceptual and spiritual, I am interested in where and how these two realms meet in art.
Whilst my art practice might well be my very own emancipatory process woven into the environmental crisis, I voice myself through video, performance and interactive poetry. My first book…and they lived happily ever after….published by Snap Collective, is about to be printed.
Jonathan Mayman
I have been writing poetry for many years, taking part in a number of poetry groups in the Chester area.
Patricia Sumner
Patricia Sumner has loved creative writing ever since she was very young. As an adult, she was lucky enough to study under the poet and author Dr Gladys Mary Coles among other writers. Pat has a BA (Hons) in English Literature and Philosophy, and a Post-Graduate Certificate in Education.
Pat worked as a teacher for ten years, specialising in English. She now runs her own writing, editing and proofreading business, and she teaches creative writing to adults.
As a children’s author, Pat has written and had published children’s picture books, adventure stories, factual books, teaching resources and a novel called 'The Globbatrotter'.
As a poet, she has had two collections published. Her first collection ('Beyond the Glass') was published as a result of winning first prize in a poetry pamphlet competition. Her second collection ('The Promise of Dawn: Rites of Passage for All Beliefs') was commissioned by Veneficia Publications and contains poems and readings for various rites of passage, including weddings and funerals. Over the years, Pat's poems have been published in winners' anthologies and magazines.
Lucy Butler
Lucy Butler is a poet and freelancer based in the North-West of England. An alumni of Manchester Writing School, Lucy gained her BA English & Creative Writing and MA Creative Writing under the tutelage of acclaimed writers such as Carol Ann Duffy DBE, Andrew McMillan, Malika Booker and more. If you look under her bed, you’ll find boxes of her notebooks dating as far back as primary school.
Jackie Montague
Jackie is a performer and writer based in Ipswich. Her practice explores the epic in the ordinary. And vice versa. All is equal.
Her poem 'MotherTongue' developed from a performance at Spill Live Art Festival 2021 : Shy God by Moi Tran. The call was to invite participants to sing a song from their culture. Jackie is half Iranian- her mother arrived in the UK in the early 1960s. She initially thought she would try to do something in Farsi, (which she cannot speak.) However, instead she sang Chirpy Cheep Cheep, the 1971 hit by Middle of The Road, which is truthfully the only song her mother sang to her. This choice became a mantra: a free fall headfirst into her past, present, longing and loss.
Most recently Jackie performed at the Harwich Arts Festival for Klinker Club alongside Hugh Metcalfe.
A selection of her work also appears in the anthology 'Ten Poets' published this year by Punk independent publisher Earth Island Books.
Jackie is currently developing several spoken word performance projects, collaborating with film maker and musician John Bowers.
Edmund Dixon
Edmund Dixon (Aziz Dixon) draws on Pennine and Welsh landscapes and life experiences.
He now lives near Llanrwst.
His first collection, Because of the War, was published by Maytree Press in 2020. His poems have reached an international audience over the last 7 years.