FESTIVAL 2026

Push the Boat Out, Edinburgh’s international poetry festival, returns this November with four days of extraordinary poetry, performance, conversation, music and boundary-pushing new work.

This year’s festival explores The Space Between – the places where people, ideas, identities and artforms meet, and the possibilities that emerge in moments of transition, connection and change.

Our 2026 programme brings together brilliant voices from Scotland and around the world, including Jackie Kay, Luke Wright, Anthony Joseph, Joelle Taylor, Henry Normal, Naomi Shihab Nye, Dean Atta, Kirsty Logan, JL Williams, Scotland’s Makar Peter Mackay, Sarah Howe, Lorna Goodison, Joseph Coelho, Nick Makoha, Karen Solie, Kwame Dawes, Don Mee Choi, Hannah Lavery, Bee Asha, EmmaClaire Brightlyn and Kim Moore, among many many more.

At the heart of the festival are three brand-new poetry-led performance commissions created in association with the National Theatre of Scotland, bringing poetry into conversation with sound, film, performance and archive.

Across the weekend, discover intimate readings, lively discussions, workshops, cabaret, live music and genre-defying performances – with opportunities to listen, create, connect and experience poetry differently.

Find your space at Push the Boat Out 2026. Explore the full programme and book your tickets below.

This year we’re kicking off before the festival with a very special event with one of Scotland’s most celebrated poets aboard Leith’s iconic floating hotel, The Fingal, on Saturday 31 October. Expect an intimate evening of poetry and conversation, marking the publication of Jackie Kay’s new Selected Poems.

This year we launched a new residency programme, and partnered with Little Sparta to support the creation of collaborative, poetry-led performance work inspired by Little Sparta’s gardens and the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay more broadly. Poet Iain Morrison and visual artist Corin Sworn have improvised physical writing tools from the garden itself to create, destroy and re-create new work. Join them at Little Sparta for a warm-up event on Sunday 27 September, ahead of their date at the festival, as they asking how life morphs within systems built to order it and what ways of playful counter map-making might destabilise, rather than support, imposition.

Most of the programme will take place at one of Edinburgh’s most beloved festival venues, the Pleasance. We’re excited to be returning to such an inspiring venue again the year, with its rich creative atmosphere and vibrant festival vibes. 

With this year’s festival theme of The Space Between, we’ll be exploring liminal and transitional spaces both physical and metaphorical: from borderlands to dream states. We’ll be opening up a space for identities which defy easy categorisation, which exist both within and between different labels, celebrating the importance of the uncertain and the undefined. Poetry can be a home to the nuance missing from so much of contemporary discourse, a place which can hold two contradictory truths with curiosity and tenderness.

Environmentally, the theme will offer a lens through which to explore shorelines: their cultural significance, the hold they have on our imaginations and the threat posed by climate crisis to our coastlines as we know them.

For people who can’t come to the festival in person, we will be offering an online programme again this year, with a number of live streamed events, and a programme of events free to listen to at home via our partners EHFM. Look out for updates on the EHFM page of our website.