Perth Poetry Festival 2026

Put your ear to the ground. Something is moving.

Poets gathering. Voices rising. Words travelling across rooms, streets, libraries and stages. From the charge of slam to the intimacy of a reading, from new voices to some of the country’s finest poets, Perth Poetry Festival brings us together to listen.

Across nine days in Perth / Boorloo, poetry moves through performance, conversation, workshops, book launches, music, multicultural voices, young poets and unexpected encounters. There are poems made for the page and poems built for the stage. Poems carrying memory, Country, language, resistance, tenderness and joy.

This is WA’s annual celebration of poetry in all its forms. Live, local and shared. A place for established poets and first-timers, for the fierce and the quiet, for language that unsettles, delights, remembers and connects.

Keep your ear to the ground.