ArtfulScribe
LITFEST Local
21 – 23 March 2025
Event details
ArtfulScribe gathers writers from around the Solent region for a three-day festival celebrating local literature. Featuring a diverse community-focused programme of showcases and workshops, LitFest Local 2025 platforms established writers and new voices.
This festival is produced by ArtfulScribe and delivered with support from Mayflower Studios and with funding from Arts Council England.
Literature lives locally.
Venue
Mayflower Studios
Price
All workshops are £20.00
Age advice
Check event listings below
Running Time
Check event listings below
Events
Local Writers Showcase
Fri 21 March 2025 | 7.00pm | 16+ | 2 hours 30 minutes including an interval
Celebrating a range of voices and writing from the Solent region, ArtfulScribe offers a showcase of talent for audiences to discover and connect with local writers.
Women In Science: Told through Poetry & Dance
Sat 22 March 2025 | 7.00pm | 2 hours 30 minutes including an interval
ArtfulScribe, in collaboration with author and community artist Susmita Bhattacharya, presents an evening celebrating women in science, told through poems, stories, South Asian dance forms and music. This community-focused headline event will bring the art and invention of these awe-inspiring women from around the world to life through creative representations of invention, hard work and talent; women who are mathematical geniuses, who have taken a mission to the moon, and who are leading figures in the UK’s biomedical sphere today.
Community Showcase
Sun 23 March 2025 | 2.30pm | 3 hours including an interval
ArtfulScribe’s Community Showcase gathers writers from around the Solent for an intergenerational celebration of work produced through regular writing groups: Writing for Wellbeing, Writing as Spiritual Practice, Mayflower Junior and Young Writers, Mayflower Creative Writers, and Writing for Page and Stage.
Workshops
No Breaks – A Prose Poetry Workshop
Sat 22 March 2025 | 10.00am | 14+ | 2 hours | £20.00
“a prose poem is a poem without line breaks” – Jeremy Noel-Tod, The Penguin Book of The Prose Poem
“The difference is spreading.” – Gertrude Stein, ‘A Carafe, That Is a Blind Glass’
In this workshop, Ellora Sutton explores the borderless field of prose poetry and the tools a poet might deploy to keep one’s prose poetic.
The prose poem is an exciting space – a space of possibility, of otherness, of slippage and surrealism. It’s a refusal of the rules, a defiance of expectation. It’s a taking up of space on the page, a glut, a blurry abundance, a dare. It’s a haunting, a chimera. It can be a disguise, taking many forms – a joke, an essay, a warning, a wander.
Ellora Sutton is a poet and PhD student based in Hampshire. She was the Poetry Book Society Spring 2023 Pamphlet Choice with Antonyms for Burial (Fourteen Poems, 2022); her latest pamphlet is Artisanal Slush (Verve, 2023). She won the Mslexia Poetry Competition with a prose poem in 2020.
The Art of Writing Non Fiction
Sat 22 March 2025 | 1.00pm | 14+ | 2 hours | £20.00
Author Philip Hoare will discuss how to take personal experience and memory to weave stories out of the natural world, art, history and place. The workshop will include writing exercises and reading aloud of work. Attendees are invited to bring short pieces of non-fiction – maximum 400 words – to be read for critique.
Philip Hoare was born and brought up in Southampton, where he still lives. He is the author of nine works of non-fiction, including Leviathan or, The Whale, which won the 2009 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize, The Sea Inside (2013) and RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR (2017). Philip wrote and presented the BBC Arena film The Hunt for Moby-Dick, and directed three short films for BBC’s Whale Night.
His latest book, Albert & the Whale, is published by 4th Estate. He is co-curator of the Moby-Dick and Ancient Mariner ‘Big Reads’, and is professor of creative writing at the University of Southampton.
