In the wake of the enticing preview of next year‰’s festival, StAnza is delighted to announce the appointment of its new Festival Director, Lucy Burnett. Working with the current team, she will succeed Eleanor Livingstone from April 2021.

]Lucy is from south-west Scotland, and currently lives in Cockermouth. She is a poet, photographer, keen fell-runner and Munro climber. Knives Forks and Spoons Press published her climate-change narrative poem Through the Weather Glass (involving Icarus and a talking bicycle) in 2015; her third collection, Tripping Over Clouds, was published by Carcanet Press/Northern House in 2019. She has enjoyed collaborations with dancers and a French theatre company. She has worked as an environmental campaigner, notably with Ramblers Scotland; as Centre Director of Arvon Lumb Bank; and in several universities, most recently as Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Cumbria.

Robyn Marsack, Chair of the StAnza Board of Trustees, says:’StAnza has been so fortunate in Eleanor Livingstone‰’s leadership, creative programming, and sheer hard work over more than a decade. We are excited about working with her successor, Lucy Burnett, to build on StAnza‰’s reputation and extend its reach. Lucy‰’s variety of experience and interests will bring new energies and connections to StAnza, and we greatly look forward to her first festival in 2022.‰’

Lucy Burnett says:’I‰’m truly thrilled to have been appointed Festival Director of StAnza and to have the opportunity to continue taking the festival forward after the stellar tenure of Eleanor Livingstone. It‰’s an exciting time for poetry, with readership once more on the rise, especially among younger people. These are also interesting times – for Scotland, for the world, and for Scotland in the world. As the new Director of StAnza I‰’ll be committed to exploring how poetry can help voice new ways of thinking and responding to the changing circumstances in which we live.‰’