AIDS Memorial Quilt Poetry Readings with John McCullough

40 individual panels of the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt will be on display through the festival and will be free to visit throughout the Festival.

The UK AIDS Memorial Quilt commemorates more than 550 people lost to HIV and AIDS across the UK. Part of the world’s largest community art project, launched in the USA in 1985 by activist Cleve Jones, the UK Quilt was established in the late 1980s through the efforts of Scottish activist Alastair Hume. Comprising 333 handmade panels, each created by someone who loved the person it honours, the Quilt is both a powerful memorial and an enduring act of activism, ensuring those lost to HIV and AIDS are remembered and never forgotten. 

We have invited six poets to read their work, and recite the names of the 60 names of the people who are represented on the Quilt display.

John McCullough lives in Hove. His book of poems, Reckless Paper Birds (Penned in the Margins) won the 2020 Hawthornden Prize for Literature as well as being shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award. John’s collections have been Books of the Year for publications including The Guardian, The Times, The Independent and The Telegraph and he also won the Polari First Book Prize. The poem ‘Flower of Sulphur’, from his fourth collection Panic Response (Penned in the Margins), was shortlisted for the 2021 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. John is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Brighton. His fifth collection, Crowd Voltage, was published in 2026 by Bloodaxe.