StAnza — 2021 edition
Our main focus with our Creative Scotland funding has been delivering StAnza 2021. The festival brought together major poets, emerging talent, other artists and audiences from around the world. Together we discovered and celebrated, in innovative ways, the richness of poetry through an eclectic programme of international literary and cross-media events, mostly online. Engaging with festival regulars and new audiences, we created a virtual community around poetry and were voted the Best Literary Festival in the UK Saboteur awards.
Our 2021 hybrid festival allowed people to engage with poetry through live and recorded online readings; zoom workshops and gatherings; videos, podcasts and multimedia installations; one-to-one telephone readings; poetry postcards and window stickers; two poetry trails in St Andrews itself; and by participation in several crowd-sourced poetry projects.
We created new formats for online events which would not have been possible for an in-person festival. These included an online radio festival preview, an interactive discussion on poetry with an international panel on the eve of the festival, a series of ‘Poets at Home’, videos and late night audio poetry for bedtime. We also partnered with various podcasts for our popular Past & Present strand on favourite past poets.
StAnza 2021 maintained and grew audiences for poetry, including poetry in translation, and developed our international presence working with partners in the USA, across Europe and in Australia. The festival included work by poets and artists from 19 countries as well as from across Scotland and the UK, and featured poetry in English, Scots Gaelic, Scots, Doric, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Macedonian, Georgian, Latgalian, Lithuanian, Polish, Czech, German, Spanish, Russian, Palawa kani, Welsh and Irish.
As well as producing the festival, since October 2020 we have delivered poetry and events working alone and with partners including featuring in Book Week Scotland, and working with Herbology online journal, REELpoetry film festival Texas, Dig It Scotland, an online anthology of crowd sourced poetry, the 2nd international Festival of Hope and poetry for schools and community poetry book groups. We are now working on two collaborative poetry translation projects with festivals in Ukraine and Macedonia, adding poems to our Poetry Map and planning a garden reading for July. Looking ahead, while we’re delighted StAnza adapted so well to being online, we very much hope to welcome everyone back in person next year
Find out more about StAnza and the 2021 festival on their website and follow them on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
