Confirmed keynote readers/speakers: the UK poet laureate, Professor Carol Ann Duffy; poet and co-editor of Modern Poetry in Translation, David Constantine; modern American war poet, Brian Turner.

In the study and writing of poetry, voice is considered the essence which makes the work live. Critics and editors talk of a ‘distinctive voice’ and of poets ‘finding their voice’. But what is ‘voice’ in poetry? What if a writer inhabits distinctly different voices as in the practice of the dramatic monologue or in the work of a Pessoa or Browning? Where does the voice of poet and subject overlap? How are such voices formed? How does one ‘find’ one’s voice? And why is the finding of a voice expressed as a sense of discovery? Marginal voices? Lost voices?