National Poetry Day 2025

Happy National Poetry Day! For some of us every day is a poetry day but for so many people poetry simply doesn't feature on their horizon. Today the national festival, begun by the Forward Arts Foundation in 1994, is bringing it a little more into focus all over the country - in libraries and community centres, on social media and (crucially) in schools. The theme this year is "Play" and there are so many innovative resources available through the website to prompt all of us to have a play with, and to get creative with, words. From early childhood, poetry has been an integral part of my life and I firmly believe that every child has a right to enjoy it and to learn as much from it as I have.

At the moment though I’m focused very much on prose. A deadline that seemed an age away is now looming very large. I’ve got a half-completed manuscript that needs finishing, editing and sending off for printing within the next three weeks. Time pressure always focuses my mind but also panics me; with every publication I think “Next time it’ll be different” but it never is!

A big thank you though to the people who came to my Writing Our Lives workshop in Tintern last Saturday. It was, as always, such a privilege to share people's memories, to hear about their struggles and successes, their hopes and aspirations, and to help them think through ways of getting all those down on paper, both for themselves and for a wider audience. A really enjoyable and worthwhile day.