AIDS Memorial Quilt Poetry Readings with Robert Hamberger

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.

Robert Hamberger (he/him) has been shortlisted and highly commended for Forward prizes. He won The London Magazine Poetry Prize in 2023 and has been awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship. His poetry has been published in The Observer, The Spectator, New Statesman, Gay Times, fourteen poems and The Gay & Lesbian Review. He has twice been featured as the Guardian Poem of the Week and has appeared in British, American, Irish and Japanese anthologies. Blue Wallpaper (Waterloo Press) was shortlisted for the 2020 Polari Book Prize. His memoir with poems A Length of Road: Finding myself in the footsteps of John Clare was published by John Murray in 2021. His fifth collection Nude Against A Rock (Waterloo Press) was published in 2024 and longlisted for the Polari Book Prize, 2025.He lives in Brighton. 

www.roberthamberger.co.uk