Cheltenham Poetry Festival is hosting an online poetry event on the theme of healing, and the various ways one can achieve it.

There will be readings from poets Romalyn Ante and Hanna Komar.

We welcome two exciting female poets, whose work deal in their different ways with healing.

Romalyn Ante FRSL is an award-winning Filipino-born British poet and editor. She currently sits on the editorial board for Poetry London. She was born and raised in Lipa, Philippines, and migrated to the UK in 2005. She writes in English as her second language. She has years of experience as an NHS nurse, psychotherapist, and supervisor of Cognitive Behavioural Therapists. Her debut collection, Antiemetic for Homesickness (Chatto, 2020), was shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize and longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Her second collection, AGIMAT (Chatto, 2024), was awarded the Arthur Welton Award, and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and The Observer Poetry Book of the Month. Her debut novel, The Left-Behind Child, will be published by Chatto in July 2026.

What unites the poems is her simple, beautiful language, and an awareness of the difficulty of healing. – Rishi Dastidar, ‘The Best Recent Poetry’, The Guardian
An alchemical wonder of a poet –  Fiona Benson.

Hanna Komar is a Belarusian poet, writer, translator and performer. She’s published five poetry collections, including the most recent Ribwort, and a non-fiction book about the experience of incarceration for peaceful protest in Belarus. Her debut play, Body in Progress — which reflects on the cruelty of the Belarusian dictatorial regime, exile and her journey of healing — was staged at the Voila! Theatre Festival in London and later published as a book.

Hanna is a member of PEN Belarus and an honorary member of English PEN. In 2020, she received the Freedom of Speech Prize from the Norwegian Authors’ Union. She’s now working on a PhD at the University of Brighton, exploring how poetry can give voice to Belarusian women’s experiences of domestic abuse and state violence, uncovering the connections between the two and opening space for resistance.

Ribwort is a space to sit down with your pain and listen. You may think it’s not helpful, like a leaf of ribwort on a bleeding wound. The pain will probably be growing more and more acute, but if you face it, if you hold space for it. Eventually it will shrink to the size of a scratch which a leaf of ribwort can help to heal. When we have healed, we become leaves of ribwort for others, so we can sit down with their pain and listen.

The event will include an open mic. To book a slot (1 poem lasting not more than 2 minutes), please buy an open mic ticket - you do not need to buy a general admission ticket as well. When the open mic tickets have sold out, we will start a reserve lis. To join the list, please buy a general admission ticket for a minimum of £3 and email zoebrooks@cheltenhampoetryfestival.uk to ask to be put on the list.

The Poetry Festival receives no grant aid and so is entirely reliant on donations and ticket sales. While we have suggested a ticket price, tickets are pay-what-you-want, you can change the figure in the relevant box when you book your ticket. Please be generous.