Listen to the world’s best poetry read out loud.
Our twentieth birthday in review
2025 celebrates the birthday of our website, marking 20 years of bringing poetry free-of-charge to our visitors. We’ve worked hard to remain open to the public, and we are delighted to have welcomed five million visitors this year. We are supported entirely by you, the poetry-lovers who want to share that love with others, and we are hugely grateful for your care and support.
We began the year with a fabulous donation of a rare 1946 recording of the voices of T. S. Eliot, Walter de la Mare, Edith Sitwell, Cecil Day-Lewis, Louis MacNeice and others. We are seeking support to digitise and share this treasure with you next year! To read more about this, click here.
In March, we launched our Poetry Archive Now! 2025 open call and received 180 plus poems from around the world and congratulations to everyone who took part. Click here to view all of this year’s entrants. Don’t forget to explore the 2025 Winners’ Collection too, by clicking here.
Our major collection this year was of the Poetry of South Asia collection with funding help from National Heritage Lottery Fund, which launched May 31st at SOAS in London. You can enjoy recordings of the voices of Tagore and Sarojini Naidu right through to contemporary poets like Sene Seneviratne.
Other poets we have added to the Poetry Archive this year year include Mario Petrucci and the wonderful Roger Stevens who we were delighted to induct into The Children’s Poetry Archive.
We have updated our website so your searches will find more of our collections, and we will be launching a new catalogue in January, thanks to funding from the National Archives. We will be adding more resources to our refreshed TEACH area on the website for teachers and students of all ages. Next year we will bring you more recordings from the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival (2009 to 2016), so look out for those!
To our visitors, donors, Members, Patrons, funders and everyone who has helped us care for and grow the Archive – we send you a heartfelt thank you. Your support has been a shining light in otherwise difficult times and every one of you has ensured we can bring you poetry spoken aloud, more vital, inclusive and life-affirming than ever.