Winchester Poetry Festival 2025
Sunday Headline: Fiona Benson, Richard Scott, and Oluwaseun Olayiwola
This event brings together three exceptional talents whose recent books all draw upon and renew literary traditions. Oluwaseun Olayiwola’s debut is steeped in poetic tradition and draws on texts from Claudia Rankine’s Citizen to Lowell’s Life Studies. Fiona Benson, known for her retellings of Greek myth, has now turned her attention to folklore and archival accounts of witchcraft. Richard Scott’s new collection That Broke Into Shining Crystals reworks Marvell and Rimbaud to dazzling effect.
Fiona Benson is the author of four poetry collections: Bright Travellers, Vertigo & Ghost, Ephemeron and Midden Witch. Three of these have been shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot prize, and her books have won the Forward Prize, the Seamus Heaney Prize, the Roehampton Poetry Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. She is Winchester Poetry Prize 2025 judge.
Richard Scott is the author of Soho (Faber & Faber, 2018) and That Broke into Shining Crystals (Faber & Faber, 2025). He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Oluwaseun Olayiwola is a poet, critic, and choreographer. His work has been published in the Guardian, ArtReview, the TLS, the Telegraph and elsewhere. His debut collection Strange Beach was published in January 2025 by Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK) and Soft Skull Press (US).
Suitable for: all
Duration: 1.5 hours
Format: in person and online
Access: BSL interpreted
