National Poetry Day, held annually, falls on 28th September in 2017 and to celebrate the BBC is launching the UK’s biggest ever poetry festival, dedicated to new work. The festival run in conjunction with the BBC last year and saw more poetry books sold than ever before, but this year’s event is promising to be bigger and better!
The event will be called Contains Strong Language and will take place across four days, starting on National Poetry Day on 28th September. The festival will celebrate the power of poetry and words in all forms, encompassing both old and new works.
The festival will be hosted by the UK’s City of Culture, which is presently Hull and will include an ensemble of artists including Jacob Polley and Harry Giles who have all been commissioned to produce new work.
If you can’t get to Hull don’t worry because BBC Two and BBC Four are keeping up with the action, showing documentaries and live performances around the festival with live broadcasts from presenters such as Jo Whiley, Cerys Matthews, Ian McMillan and others.
National Poetry Day and the promotions and events around it have been doing wonders for sales in the poetry sector, last year a record one million poetry books were sold in the UK, and this year sales are already up around 14%. The most popular poetry book of the year accounts for a massive 7.7% of these sales and that is from Instapoet Rupi Kaur, whose Milk and Honey has sold over 40,000 books in the last six months.
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