Poetry Africa Reveals Full Programme for its 30th Festival, 5-9 October 2026
University of KwaZulu Natal’s Centre for Creative Arts revealed the Poetry Africa programme for its 30th festival, running from 5 to 9 October 2026 at the Durban Playhouse Theatre and venues across the city.
Over the week, the festival will bring together stage performances, poetry slams, industry panels, workshops and a schools programme, anchored by the 5th World Poetry Slam Championship, which brings 40 slam poets from 40 nations and five continents to Durban.
This year's edition lands alongside a cluster of significant anniversaries: 50 years since the 1976 Soweto Youth Uprising, 30 years since the first public hearings of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission and 30 years since the adoption of the 1996 Constitution (including Section 16's guarantee of freedom of expression and creative freedom).
“1976, 1996, the TRC represent an unfinished conversation about who gets to speak and be heard in this country. Poetry Africa exists to keep that conversation alive, because freedom of expression is a responsibility we renew every time a poet takes the stage." says Centre for Creative Arts Director Ismail Mahomed.
"Every one of these anniversaries is really about a voice: a generation's, a nation's, a poet's. This year's theme, Every Word a Street, Every Voice a City, asks what we build when those voices are finally given room.” Says curator Siphindile Hlongwa.
The festival opens at the Playhouse Drama Theatre with a programme hosted by South African poet Lebo Mashile, featuring a keynote address from 2026 Featured Poet Koleka Putuma and performances from Ana More (Ukraine), Haroun Amri (Algeria), Nanda (Gabon), Steel the Poet (South Africa), Lifetime Achievement honouree Dr Gcina Mhlophe, and celebrated Jamaican-Canadian dub poet and playwright D'bi Young Anitafrika, a three-time Dora Award winner known for her Sankofa Trilogy and for founding the Watah Theatre in Toronto. The same evening includes the Chalkboard Slam Competition, Poetry Africa's spoken-word initiative for high school learners.
The Poetry Africa National Slam Jam runs its semi-finals and final on Tuesday 6 October. The World Poetry Slam Championship then progresses through quarter-finals, semi-finals and a final from Wednesday 7 to Friday 9 October.
Alongside the performances, Poetry Africa's industry programme features panel discussions and workshops marking 30 years of the festival, sustainability and longevity in poetry practice, artist mobility, contracts and rights, queer poetics, professional branding, and technology in poetry, together with a book launch for Thando Fuze's Fluent in the Language of Burial.
Closing day features a staged production of Water, developed from Koleka Putuma's celebrated 2016 poem of the same name, which won the PEN South Africa student writing prize and is widely taught for its meditation on access to water as a political and racialised inheritance. The Poetry Africa staging extends that work into a meditation on ownership, belonging, ecological and climate justice, and the ports, trade routes and nightlife economies that shape who gets to belong where.
About Poetry Africa
Poetry Africa is an annual international poetry festival curated and presented by the Centre for Creative Arts at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) in Durban.
Running since 1997, the festival brings together spoken-word and published poets from South Africa and around the world for performances, panel discussions, campus and school visits, poetry exchanges, book launches, open mic sessions and slam competitions.
Over 30 years, Poetry Africa has created a platform for poets and audiences to reflect on the role of poetry in society and social change, while also supporting academic scholarship in contemporary poetry at UKZN.
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