UK's largest ever poetry festival planned for Olympics

Poets from all 205 competing countries to join event in 2012

• Alison Flood
• guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 31 May 2011

London's Southbank Centre, which is organising the Poetry Parnassus. Photograph: Graeme Robertson

From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, poets from the 205 Olympic nations are competing to be part of the UK's largest ever poetry festival next year.

Led by the Southbank Centre's artist in residence, Simon Armitage, and artistic director Jude Kelly, Poetry Parnassus will be part of next year's Cultural Olympiad. It will see 205 poets – one from each of the 205 Olympic nations – taking part in readings, workshops and a gala event, touring the UK and contributing a poem in their own language for a poetry collection, The World Record, which will champion poetry in translation.

Members of the public around the world are being asked to nominate up to three poets from any of the 205 Olympic competing nations, with a panel featuring Armitage and other poetry experts then shortlisting the recommendations to come up with a final line-up of one poet per country. This will be announced in spring 2012.

"Southbank Centre's Poetry Parnassus draws inspiration from Mount Parnassus in Greece – one of poetry's spiritual and mythical heartlands, the home of the lyricist Orpheus and the dwelling place of the poetic Muses," said Armitage. "My hunch is that this will be the biggest poetry event ever - a truly global coming together of poets, and a monumental poetic happening worthy of the spirit and history of the Olympics themselves."


The event, which counts the poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, Seamus Heaney, Andrew Motion and Melvyn Bragg among its patrons, will take place from 26 June to 2 July 2012 as part of the finale of the Olympiad. Organisers said that, given the spread of countries which they hope will be attending, there are likely to be "difficulties around obtaining visas and permission to travel for some poets". But they will be offering air fare and accommodation to a poet from every Olympic nation, and "we will do our best to ensure that every poet is able to attend", they said.

Full story at The Guardian.