IP1 caught up with local boy Luke Wright to talk all things Latitude Festival

It’s Latitude festival’s 10th anniversary – how many times have you been now?
This will be the 10th time I’ve hosted and performed there since it started in 2006.

So what is it that keeps bringing you back?
As a performer it’s a wonderful stage, great audience, beautiful festival, great other acts – the sort of weekend I’d go to even if I wasn’t on the bill. As a programmer it’s really great to have a relatively large budget to work with for poetry, to programme so many acts – we programme the best part of sixty poets, so that’s a great creative challenge. It’s just a cool thing to do! It’s great to be able to throw a massive poetry party, I love doing it, and it’s a great rare opportunity to work with people in my field. We’re all off doing our own gigs so it’s not often we all get to see each other, so it becomes a wonderful social occasion for poets as well.

We published your poem about Latitude’s 10th anniversary on our website – are we going to see that at the festival this year?
Why not? It’s our message. I might well get it out at some point when I’m compering.

You’re co-curating this year’s Poetry Arena at Latitude Festival. What’s that like?
I work with Tania Harrison, who’s the arts curator for the whole festival. We programme together, so we start off with our headliners, and then we go from there. We get a feel of what the festival’s going to be like, the theme across the whole festival, and we try and respond to as well. So we start with some big names, then we start thinking about specials, little ways that we can make the tent feel more interesting: sometimes it’s collaborations with poets, sometimes we’re commissioning people, sometimes they’re bringing their one-man or one-woman theatre shows. From there we start programming shorter slots, and we also have the ‘new voice’ lot, who are people who perhaps haven’t performed on a platform that big before. They’re the last people we do, and we haven’t done that yet, but we’re pretty much there – we’re about 90% of the way there.

So the line-up’s going to be announced on Monday, isn’t it?
Yeah, I’m not really allowed to say, but suffice to say there are some really interesting people and a mix of old hands and new talent – we like to welcome everyone. And we’re really very lucky; pretty much everyone has said yes, I’ve had only a couple of people who had prior engagements and couldn’t make it, so it’s my A-List of people. My dream team!

Latitude Festival will take place at Henham Park, Southwold, from Thursday 16th to Sunday 19th July. Don’t miss Luke and his poetry ‘dream team’ – get your tickets here!

Photo: Steve Ullathorne