The Dobunni Poetry Festival

Aim

We are raising funds to launch the brand new Dobunni Poetry Festival in Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK.

The Dobunni Poetry Festival 2026 is Stroud’s brand new dedicated poetry festival, creating a cultural home for writers, readers, and audiences of all ages.

Stroud is a town rich in creativity, a place known for its independent spirit, its artistic communities across disciplines and its deep connection to landscape and radical thought.

Three local writers and facilitators have come together to organise this new poetry festival, which is a partnership between Dialect Writers CIC and the Gloucestershire Poetry Society, with support from Stroud Arts Festival.

Our fundraising target is £12,000 to cover the costs of this first festival, which includes paying poets and hiring venues, plus running costs to plan and create the festival.

See our festival flyer below and the list of poets booked for our festival!

Our festival flyer shows some of the poets who will be featured. We have over 20 events that will run over three days at venues in and around the town.

Featuring

PASCALE PETIT

ALISON BRACKENBURY

Plus

AMBIENT RECEIVER - ZOE BROOKS - CLAIRE CARROLL - CHAKA

JASON CONWAY - HANNAH COPLEY - KYM DEYN - GINNY DARKE 

KAREN DOWNS BARTON - SUYIN DU BOIS - RHIAN ELIZABETH

ANGELA FRANCE - RACHEL GOODMAN - REBECCA GOSS

GEORGIA GRIFFITHS - LUCY HOLME - ADAM HOROVITZ

HUGHES - ANDREW HYKEL MEARS - AARON KENT - LENZO

LIVING MATTER - JLM MORTON - JOSHUA O’CATHASAIG - PEY OH

ALYCIA PIRMOHAMED - KATE POTTS - ELEANOR REES

ELVIRE ROBERTS - PHILIP RUSH - ANNA SAUNDERS

MARTHA SPRACKLAND - SOLLE - ELLORA SUTTON - TSANTANA

LYDIA UNSWORTH - MERCE WHITE - JAKE WILD HALL

ALICE WILLITTS - JONNY FLUFFYPUNK & UTA BALDAUF X WORD LAB

BLACK EYES PUBLISHING UK + ALEX PERRY

SLIGHT AFTERPARTY WITH LOST MYTHOS + GOD OF SPORTS

Venues

LANSDOWN HALL - STROUD LIBRARY - TRINITY ROOMS
CHAPELS OF REST - BORDERLESS BOOKS - LANSDOWN GALLERY
HOLY TRINITY CHURCH - ROUGH HANDS - YARD GALLERY

Fair pay for poets

This festival will set the bar for how poetry festivals pay fair rates to poets and provide a wide range of events with something for everyone to enjoy, featuring big names and local poets. This is a celebration of poetry and local and regional talent with a strong focus on community and place. Poetry is a powerful tool for creative expression, one that brings joy and inspiration, and our poets deserve recognition for the stories they tell. As this is the national year for reading, we want this festival to encourage people to read poetry. We also welcome people not familiar with attending poetry events. This festival is, after all, a celebration of words, language and connection to place, for all to enjoy. The festival team are passionate about the transformational impact that creative writing has. The writing community deserve fair rates and should not be expected to perform/read for free or for low fees.

Why Dobunni?

We chose the name Dobunni to root the festival firmly in the landscape and history of this part of rural Gloucestershire. The Dobunni were an Iron Age tribe whose territory covered much of what is now the Severn Vale, the Cotswolds, and the Five Valleys - including Stroud. Their presence shaped the rural character of this region long before modern boundaries existed, leaving traces in archaeology, place names and the deep cultural memory of the land.

A Dobunni coin

A map showing the territory of the Dobunni tribe overlaid in red in the context of the modern county boundaries of England and Wales.

By naming the festival after the Dobunni, we’re honouring a lineage of creativity and connection to place. It signals that this is a festival grown from the ground up - shaped by the people who live and work here, attentive to the rural territory that has always held stories, and committed to celebrating the voices that rise from it today.

The name anchors the festival in a specific geography and heritage, while opening a space for contemporary writers to explore what it means to belong to and live with this landscape now.

Platforming emerging and established voices

The festival will run across three days, 15–17 October 2026, bringing together headline poets of national standing with the exceptional local talent already thriving in the Five Valleys and across Gloucestershire. We aim to create a platform where emerging and established voices can share work side by side, strengthening the region’s literary ecosystem and giving Stroud the kind of cultural infrastructure it deserves.

At its heart, the Dobunni Poetry Festival is about access, opportunity, and belonging.

We want to build a festival that feels open to everyone - from young people discovering poetry for the first time to older writers who have never had a space to share their work publicly. Stroud has a vibrant poetry community, but it lacks a central event where people can gather, connect, learn, and feel part of something larger. This festival will provide that anchor.

We have high hopes of making this an annual festival!

Meet the festival team

Pictured from left to right are JLM Morton, Emma Kernerhan & Jason Conway.

JLM Morton

JLM Morton’s is co-director of Dialect. Her poetry has appeared on BBC6 Music, in Poetry Review, Poetry London, Rialto, Magma, Mslexia and elsewhere. She’s won the Geoffrey Dearmer and  Laurie Lee prizes and was highly commended by the Forward Prizes. Her debut collection is Red Handed (2024). Her second, Borrowed Ground, is forthcoming in August 2026.

Emma Kernahan

Emma is co-director of Dialect and is a short fiction and comedy writer with a background in support work.

Jason Conway

Jason is a professional daydreamer, director of the Gloucestershire Poetry Society and Editor of Steel Jackdaw Magazine. He lives and works in the town as an award-winning multidisciplinary creative. Jason is a published author and poet with a deep connection to nature. Debut collection 'the wash of hours' (Black Eyes Publishing UK, 2025).

Help us reach our target by pledging 

You can pledge without a reward, sponsor an event or the entire festival. If you're local and love poetry or creative writing, consider becoming a festival volunteer, or share this Crowdfunder to help us reach more people.

By pledging, you will be supporting the local writing community, recognising the importance of literature as cultural enrichment and a powerful tool for storytelling, one that enables people to share their unique perspectives. You will be supporting the local gig economy, the venues and publishers involved in the festival. Festivals are a great way to bring the community together, and poetry is an accessible medium that transcends socio-economic and cultural barriers. We believe that poetry has an important role to play today in reading comprehension, community building, mental health and reconnection to and appreciation for nature. Your pledge will make a valuable difference.

With your help, we can make the Dobunni Poetry Festival a success and build the foundations to make this an annual festival. If we succeed, surplus funds will go towards next year's festival.

We can do this, but only with your help!

Merchandise coming soon...

The festival will have a range of merchandise available from T-Shirts to Tote Bags and more. We are currently creating these and will integrate them with the festival website in the last week of July.

Our risks and challenges

The main risk is not meeting our £12k target, as this is a key milestone to ensure that everyone is rightfully paid for their time. There is always a risk that we will not raise sufficient funds. If this is the case, we will look at revising the festival to one day in duration and/or reducing the number of events. We are determined to run the festival, but the content of it is dependent on the funds we can raise. 

It's important to be completely transparent around our fundraising target, so that our costs are explained and to demonstrate our commitment to pay poets/performers at a fair level. We passionately believe that poets deserve fair pay rates.

As well as this crowdfunding round, we are selling event tickets on the festival website. The festival team are also contacting local businesses for event and festival sponsorship. Through this mix of funding activities, we are confident that the main target will be met. We have already secured seed funding from Stroud Arts Festival. 

We also have the challenge of securing enough volunteering roles, as we need volunteers to act as stewards, guides and for other festival roles, to make sure that the festival runs smoothly and so that everyone who attends is made to feel welcome and supported.

Funding method

Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made by 7th September 2026 at 10:55pm