Award-winning poet Jane Campbell is this week’s special guest at the Cellar Bards for an event that marks the start of the annual Coracle Europe Arts Festival.

The event is on tonight, Friday, 14 October. Doors open at 7.30pm at the Cellar Bar, Quay Street, Cardigan. Entry is £3. People can sign up on the door for open mic slots.

Jane (pictured), who lives in the Teifi Valley, was joint winner of the Geoff Stevens Memorial Poetry Prize last year with her first collection, Slowly as Clouds (Indigo Dreams Publishing). She has just won the 2022 Disability Arts Cymru Creative Writing Award.

She’s the only child of a Falls Rd, Belfast dad and an English, strike leader mum. She lives happily in an off-grid homemade tiny house overlooking the Teifi river, growing food and working with other writers. She describes herself as “an eco-feminist rebel-dyke poet”.

Slowly as Clouds was described by TS Eliot prizewinner Joelle Taylor as “a stunning meditation on mortality, fused with incisive lived eco-poetry... Somewhere between grief and growing, this great book is wise, alive, and wild. Highly recommended”.

The Coracle Europe Fringe is an international arts festival that has been held in Ceredigion and Carmarthenshire since 2018.

It features poetry, music, visual art, story-telling and film with performances and performers from Sweden, Ireland, Serbia, Colombia, and Portugal.

The festival is also a global platform for local artists and performers and in 2022 is very closely associated with the Press Speak Not Delete project, delivered by Carmarthenshire based write4word CIC. This project creates a hybrid of physical performance and digital channels to develop a more diverse and accessible arts sector.

See The Cellar Bards Facebook page for more information.