Festival 2026: First Wave
Festival Nights released. Full programme announced 1st October.
Days:
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pool burn lock and sluice at Little Sparta
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
This year we partnered with Little Sparta to launch a new residency programme. Inspired by Iain Hamilton Finlay’s concrete poetry garden, Iain Morrison and Corin Sworn have improvised physical writing tools from the garden itself to create new work, exploring how life morphs within systems built to order it.
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An Evening with Jackie Kay
6:45 pm - 8:30 pm
In partnership with the Fingal Hotel, don’t miss this lively and intimate event with the award-winning poet and writer Jackie Kay! Join us on board this luxury floating venue for an exclusive festival warm up celebrating the publication of Jackie Kay’s new Selected Poems. Enjoy readings, stories – and a glass of fizz on arrival!
Get TicketsOpening Night Cabaret, with Luke Wright
8:00 pm - 10:00 pm
Join us as we launch Push the Boat Out 2026 in style! Luke Wright will take the stage with an explosive set spanning more than two decades of poetry and performance: expect poems with sharp edges, strong rhythms and a big heart. Opening the night, we’ll enjoy poems from EmmaClaire Brightlyn and Nick Makoha and music from rapper RamZee.
Get TicketsAn Evening with Henry Normal
8:00 pm - 9:00 pm
To celebrate the publication of his fourth collected poems anthology, writer, poet and TV producer Henry Normal has concentrated his thousand or so poems into a one-hour show like a tin of Campbell’s soup in a black hole. Comedy, poetry, stories and songs – he’s managed to pack everything into the show and more.
Get TicketsMaryville by Joelle Taylor
7:30 pm - 8:30 pm
Join Joelle Taylor for the Scottish Premiere of the staged reading of Maryville: a searing, poetic excavation of fifty years of lesbian counterculture that charts the lives of four butch lesbians through five decades of underground queer history. Directed by Neil Bartlett, with visuals from Sweatmother, Maryville explores the scars, hopes and potentialities of dyke identity and the queer underground.
Get TicketsPush the Boat Out’s Saturday night gig with Anthony Joseph and band
7:30 pm - 10:30 pm
Push the Boat Out’s annual Saturday Night gig presents award-winning writer and musician Anthony Joseph and his band. At their only Scottish gig this year, enjoy a hypnotic fusion of spoken word, jazz, Afrobeat, funk and the rhythms of the Caribbean. With support from rapper, poet and musician, Bee Asha.
Get TicketsOn Slack Tide, with Aurora Engine, JL Williams, Dean Atta and special guest
8:00 pm - 9:00 pm
This specially commissioned collaboration from musician Aurora Engine and poets JL Williams, Dean Atta and Kirsty Logan fuses music, voice, electronica, poetry and performance in a singular, striking soundscape. It explores life transitions of birth, coming of age and death; and the waiting, stasis and flurries of emotion that accompany them.
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