Lancaster Words is a biannual festival which celebrates the written and spoken word.
In 2017, the Department launched the first Lancaster Words Literary Festival: an event that featured appearances by writers and artists such as PJ Harvey, Yvonne Battle-Felton and Paul Muldoon in a range of venues around the campus and the city. It also featured student-led activity such as the Telling in Full exhibition (a student-curated exhibition of art inspired by the written word). The 2019 iteration saw us welcome Zaffar Kunial, Lennie Sanders and Cat Woodward to Lancaster.
Our next in-person version of the Festival will be taking place 26th July – 2nd July 2022. It sees the Festival switch to an annual format. Students will come together to celebrate the end of the year and promote their own work through events such as the launch of that year’s Creative Writing MA Anthology. As well as workshops and readings from established writers, students will have the opportunity to produce their own literary events.
The 2022 Lancaster Playwriting Prize will be focussed on discovering school-aged playwrights in the North West. Check here and on Departmental social media for further information later in the year.
Anyone interested in being involved in Lancaster Words 2022 should email Dr Taj Hayer at t.hayer@lancaster.ac.uk.
Lenni Sanders is a writer and performer who lives in Manchester and who studied at Lancaster University, winning the undergraduate Programme Prize for Poetry in 2014. Lenni's poetry has appeared in The Tangerine, Butcher's Dog, Adjacent Pineapple, The Emma Press Anthology of Love and elsewhere. Lenni's first pamphlet, Poacher, was published in 2019 by The Emma Press. She returned to Lancaster to read her work at Lancaster Words 2019.
Cat Woodward is a feminist modern lyric poet and read at Lancaster Words 2019. Cat studied at The University of East Anglia; her PhD is in robot and lyric voice, her doctoral research was funded through a CHASE studentship. Her first collection, Sphinx, was published by Salò, press in 2017, her second collection Blood. Flower. Joy! Was published by Knives, Forks and Spoons in late 2019. In 2018 she won the Ivan Juritz Prize for creative experiment.
Zaffar Kunial read at Lancaster Words 2019. His debut collection, Us, was published by Faber & Faber in 2018; it was shortlisted for a number of awards including the T S Eliot Prize and the Costa Poetry Award. He is poet in residence at the Bronte Parsonage and was at The Oval, as part of the Places of Poetry. In September 2019, Faber & Faber published a new pamphlet of poems by Zaffar on the subject of cricket and time, called Six.
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