Friday, 2nd June 2023
Manchester Poetry Library and NAWE launches new Accessible Hybrid Literature Festival Guide
We are excited to launch the Accessible Hybrid Literature Festival guide in collaboration with National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE) and Kendal Poetry Festival as part of a year-long research project by the learning team at Manchester Poetry Library.
In May 2022 Manchester Poetry Library was commissioned by NAWE to write a practical guide for festival leaders on how to improve their accessibility practice, using Kendal Poetry Festival as a case study. The guide was launched as part of NAWE conference February 2023.
The fifth Kendal Poetry Festival took place online and in Kendal itself during June 2022, hosted by co-directors Clare Shaw and Kim Moore (staff at Manchester Writing School). Kendal Poetry Festival have been committed to creating an accessible festival experience particularly for disabled and working-class writers and audience members. After a fully online festival in 2021, the team embarked on a hybrid festival in 2022, to much success.
During lockdowns in the UK literature events became unprecedentedly accessible to D/deaf and Disabled audiences, through high quality digital offers. Since the ending of government restrictions many D/deaf and disabled artists have voiced concerns about a movement back towards exclusively in-person events. It feels vital to acknowledge the work of festivals pushing for hybridity and provisions for D/deaf and disabled artists and audiences. This guide wants to record and honour this work, and to push more festival organisers to keep their work hybrid and accessible particularly to disabled communities, especially those still isolating.
This guide will particularly focus on accessibility for D/deaf and disabled audiences, performers and staff members, but always with an intersectional approach and with an understanding that radical access work means improving access across all marginalised experience.
The aim is for a clear guide based on practical solutions for how to approach building and learning from what Kendal Poetry Festival experienced, supporting festivals looking to improve their practice. This guide offers a model for working towards accessible practice as ordinary, not exceptional, in literary festivals.
This guide was written after in-depth interviews with the co-directors, other staff members, disabled artists and audience members. It speaks to a specific moment in time and does not aim to be the guide that speaks to everyone or everything, but we hope it will be a useful resource for festival organisers and event organisers in the poetry scene to ask themselves the right questions to improve accessibility in their practice. There are other fantastic accessibility resources that we hope this guide will be in community with including The Inklusion Guide.
The guide covers five principal areas, Hybrid Events and Festivals, Accessibility and Inclusion, Programming, Collaboration and Partnerships, and Project Management. It includes case studies, step-by-step guides, and reflections on learning from Kendal Poetry Festival 2022.
Manchester Poetry Library are committed to improving our own accessibility, and we will be working to implement the suggestions of this guide into our own events programming, as well as continuing to expand our own learning.
An audio version of this guide is currently in development. We are excited to share the pdf with you here.
If you would like to discuss the guide or respond to anything included in the guide, please email r.havers@mmu.ac.uk. We would particularly like to hear from organisers who want to use the guide.
