The Keats Foundation supports the Keats House Young Poets.

The Keats Foundation is delighted to announce its support the Keats House Young Poets, with an award of £5000 to ensure that the group can continue to meet and the poets’ work to flourish in the coming months. This sponsorship furthers the Foundation’s aims to   encourage enjoyment and understanding of Keats’s poems, letters, life and times and to inspire new generations of young poets to fulfil their creative ambitions. We support educational initiatives based at Keats House, and more widely at festivals, readings, conferences and other Keats-related events.

Keats House Young Poet, Simon Mole, writes:

The Keats House Poets are a collective of 8 poets who have been meeting regularly to share new work and organise poetry events at Keats House since 2010. Our events are free to attend and are renowned as both a relaxed and friendly environment to read new work and a place to enjoy high quality performance from some big names. We aim to honour the poetry of the past, celebrate the poetry of the present, and nurture the poetry of the future.

Our upcoming year of activity (which we are lucky and grateful to have funded by the Keats Foundation!)  began with a very well attended performance event at Keats House as part of the Keats Festival in May – Hannah Lowe was our headliner, Dean Atta was the featured Keats House poet, and at least ten other poets read on the open mic. As ever, there was a very mixed cross-generational audience with several young people visiting the museum to buy cordarone online.

We’ll be running 4 more free to attend ‘Keats House Poets present…’ events throughout the year and have already lined up Tom Chivers, Karen McCarthy Woolf and Roger Robinson to headline. We are also running 5 writing workshops across the year, often with seasonal themes inspired by quotes from Keats poetry.

Some images of recent readings by the Keats House poets follow here.