To celebrate, we’d like to invite you to join us in a conversation about the most important artists, the most important books, the most important theatre shows and more.
20 Years of Latitude
Next summer, we’ll gather to celebrate the twentieth edition of Latitude Festival. Twenty years of festival line ups that celebrate the breadth of the arts.
Thousands of artists have moved us with theatre, with literature, with songs, with laughter, with dance. Together, we’ve experienced moments that simply couldn’t have happened anywhere else.
Thousands of artists have moved us with theatre, with literature, with songs, with laughter, with dance. Together, we’ve experienced moments that simply couldn’t have happened anywhere else.
Part mission statement, part cultural archive, part collective memory. A cultural and social survey and conversation with you, our audience, to establish in your eyes and our eyes what the most important aspects of modern life and culture have been.
For twenty years, Latitude has been a home for words that move, challenge and connect us. Through poetry, stories are shared, identities explored, and truths spoken that draw us closer together.
As we celebrate two decades of voices that have shaped our cultural landscape, we honour a poet whose work continues to resonate deeply; Inua Ellams.
When we first encountered Inua Ellams in 2006, he was a part of our very first poetry line up. A young poet with a single collection and an unmistakable energy, Inua had a voice that seemed to arrive fully formed. His work carried the qualities that now define him; his linguistic precision, emotional clarity and a gift for bridging the mythic with the everyday. On his second appearance at Latitude, he continued the art of sharing his widening creative horizon and a deeper resonance in the world beyond Henham Park.
A Poet Who Built His Own Lineage
Born in Nigeria and raised between London, Dublin and beyond, Ellams grew up navigating multiple worlds - a tension that continues to inform his approach to language, identity, and belonging. In Dublin, his community college teacher, Senan Nolan, sparked the love of poetry that would shape his voice for years to come. His early poems explored migration, masculinity and memory with a rarely spoken honesty that blended Nigerian storytelling traditions with the rhythm of contemporary spoken word.
His debut collection, Thirteen Fairy Negro Tales, signalled a striking new voice. Fable mingling with lived experience and myth interwoven with modernity giving us a fresh delivery and perspective to poetry.
Though many now know Ellams for theatrical works such as Barber Shop Chronicles - which travelled from the National Theatre to stages across the world - his journey began, and always returns to, poetry.
Across forms, Ellams’ work asks what it means to be human in a fractured world. His writing spans displacement and diasporic joy, politics and pop culture, the personal and the mythic - always with an artistry that feels both deeply rooted and unmistakably contemporary.
Why Inua Matters to Latitude
Inua Ellams embodies everything this twentieth-anniversary project hopes to honour: artists whose work has shaped not only the festival, but the wider cultural conversation. He arrived at Latitude as a young poet early in his career. Today he stands as one of the defining literary voices of his generation.
His words have travelled from small rooms to international stages, but what has always mattered most to us is the way his storytelling invites us to see one another more clearly.
As we look back on two decades of poetry at Henham Park, it feels profoundly right to celebrate a poet whose work has helped define our first year. His voice continues to resonate with us today. And for that, we’re proud to celebrate Inua Ellams as The Most Important Poet.
His words have travelled from small rooms to international stages, but what has always mattered most to us is the way his storytelling invites us to see one another more clearly.
As we look back on two decades of poetry at Henham Park, it feels profoundly right to celebrate a poet whose work has helped define our first year. His voice continues to resonate with us today. And for that, we’re proud to celebrate Inua Ellams as The Most Important Poet.
Sign up to stay up to date with 20 years of Latitude!
Please enter your information below.
Thank you for joining the conversation.