A new literary festival celebrating the life and work of Sylvia Plath launches in Hebden Bridge next month

The Sylvia Plath Literary Festival will mark the 90th birthday of the acclaimed American poet who lived in the Calder Valley during her marriage to fellow poet Ted Hughes. Events will include a poetry brunch, a poetry séance and open mic night, writing workshops and close readings and a cocktail hour with Gail Crowther, author of Three Martini Afternoons at the Ritz: the Rebellion of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Th ere will also be a range of digital and live-streamed events.

The festival grew out of a 90th birthday party for Plath, organised in 2018 by Hebden Bridge-based poet, novelist and academic Sarah Corbett who is the festival’s director. “I used to run a poetry series with the local independent bookshop The Bookcase but I had always wanted to do a special celebration for Sylvia Plath’s birthday,” she says. “The event sold out pretty quickly and lots of people from the Plath scholarly community came. Then I was approached by the Arts Council and they asked me whether I would consider doing a festival. Although initially I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to take it on, it felt like an important thing to do.”

Funding was secured in 2019 and planning began for the festival but was interrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic. In the meantime, along with poet Ian Humphreys, Corbett also had funding for an anthology of new poems and essays inspired by Plath’s life, work and legacy. Entitled After Sylvia it is published in October and will be launched at the festival. It features five key themes, all of which recurred in Plath’s own work – rebirth, womanhood, magic, mothers and fathers, and nature.

A range of award-winning and acclaimed writers have contributed to the anthology, including Mona Arshi, Caroline Bird, Mary Jean Chan, Zaffar Kunial, Pascale Petit and Jacob Polley with a combination of commissions and competitions used to select the work, so that both established and emerging voices would be included. “We commissioned around forty British and Irish poets and some international poets to write in response to Sylvia Plath and her work and many of those cite Plath as a major influence in their writing. The response to the international competition was huge – we had 1,800 entries. It took some judging.”

The book’s final poem is by ten-year-old Nina Billard Sarmadi who won the Young Poets Network’s Sylvia Plath challenge – Plath herself was just eight years old when her first poem was published in the Boston Herald. In 2018, when the Poetry Society conducted a worldwide survey to find out which poets young people most admired, Plath came out on top.

In the narrative surrounding Plath, which tends to focus on her mental health issues, her suicide and her relationship with Hughes, the fact that she was an extraordinarily talented writer and forceful creative spirit frequently seems to get lost. Both the festival and the anthology are an attempt to reframe Plath’s story. “We want to bring her work to wider audiences and also to shift the thinking around her. She had this incredible creative life and she was hugely influential.”

A highlight of the festival will be a talk from Heather Clark author of the much-praised Plath biography Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath which explores in great depth Plath’s prodigious talent, creative drive and lasting legacy. “There is an emerging generation of female scholars and writers who are looking at how important Plath was as a turning point in English and American poetry. At the time that she came through, poetry was all a bit conservative and staid and she and Hughes blew that apart. She has always been labelled as a confessional poet, but if you look at how she was writing and what she was writing about – motherhood, miscarriage, adoption – she was talking about the female experience. And she is often just furious – she was on the cusp of second wave feminism and her work is full of fury about the double standards applied to women. Those things are incredibly important; she changed the perception around what poetry can do and be – angry and powerful.”

The Sylvia Plath Literary Festival takes place October 21-23 in Hebden Bridge and Heptonstall. After Sylvia is published on October 20 and will be launched at the festival. plathfest.co.uk