RECORD-breaking crowds enjoyed this year’s Woodstock Poetry Festival.

Festival founder Rachel Phipps said the event, which ran from Friday to Sunday last week, saw 715 people through the gates, up on last year.

Witney Gazette:

Festival founder Rachel Phipps

As a result, a fourth festival will definitely be planned for 2015.

Mrs Phipps, who owns The Woodstock Bookshop, said: “It was the best festival yet.

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“We had a fantastic array of different events and poets.”

About 250 people flocked to the opening reading, by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, at St Mary Magdalene Church on Friday evening.

“Everything else was well attended,” said Mrs Phipps.

The festival’s main venue, Woodstock Methodist Church, was packed with about 80 people for Irish poet Michael Longley, whose book The Stairwell has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, on Saturday, and a joint reading by Katrina Porteous and Liz Berry on Sunday.

Mrs Phipps said of the overall audience: “It was a complete mix. Some people came from a long way away.”

After three years, the festival’s popularity is growing beyond Oxfordshire.

She added: “It’s just a gradual increase in people hearing about it.”


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