The final event of the Festival is once again reserved for the hugely popular Poetry Showcase. Our 2026 Showcase hosts – the brilliant Katherine Stansfield and Stephen Payne – have curated a stellar line-up featuring Hilary Watson, Matthew Paul, Tracey Rhys and Bethany Handley (pictured).

Join us for a lively evening of verse as we close the festival weekend in suitably poetic style.

Our 2026 line-up:

Bethany Handley is an award-winning writer, poet and disability activist from South Wales. Named one of the UK’s ten most influential disabled people in politics, law and media by the Shaw Trust 2024, she campaigns for disability rights and better access to nature. An ambassador for Country Living’s Access for All, Wales Coast Path, and Ramblers Cymru, her debut poetry pamphlet Cling Film was published by Seren in 2025. Bethany co-edited Beyond / Tu Hwnt, a ground-breaking bilingual anthology of Welsh Deaf and disabled writers. Her work has been featured by BBC One, BBC Radio 1, BBC Radio 4, the Poetry Foundation, Country Living, The Guardian and more.

Matthew Paul hails from South London and lives in South Yorkshire. His second poetry collection, The Last Corinthians, was published by Crooked Spire Press in 2025, following The Evening Entertainment (Eyewear Publishing, 2017). His haiku collections, The Regulars (2006) and The Lammas Lands (2015) and co-written/edited (with John Barlow) anthology Wing Beats (2008) were published by Snapshot Press. His reviews and essays regularly appear in The Friday Poem and other journals. He has contributed to the Guardian’s ‘Country Diary’ column.

Tracey Rhys is an award-winning South Wales poet. She has an MA in the Teaching and Practice of Creative Writing and is a member of Literature Wales’ Writing Well programme for 2025/26, working with carers in Bridgend County. Her poetry has been widely published in anthologies and journals, featured in two stage plays by Company of Sirens, and was exhibited at The Senedd. A winner of the Poetry Archive’s WordView competition in 2020, Tracey received a Literature Wales Writer’s Bursary to complete her first pamphlet, Teaching a Bird to Sing.
Bathing on the Roof (Parthian, 2025) is Tracey’s first full collection. In 2026, several of her Bathsheba poems will be translated into Romanian by Timiᶊoara University for Mosaique Press. She lives in Bridgend with her husband and two sons and is a freelance non-fiction editor.

Our hosts:

Katherine Stansfield is a multi-genre novelist, short story writer and poet. She has published two full length poetry collections and a pamphlet with Seren Books, the most recent of which is We Could Be Anywhere By Now. Katherine also writes horror and gothic fiction under the pen name Mina Templeton; She Speaks Milk and Blood will be published in 2027. Katherine has co-written a fantasy crime trilogy with her partner David Towsey, publishing as D. K. Fields. She is a co-editor of Bending The Arc: A Thrutopian Magazine which publishes stories, poems and features that bend the arc of the possible towards a thriving future on Earth.

Stephen Payne is a professor emeritus at the University of Bath. He lives in Penarth. His first poetry collection, Pattern Beyond Chance (HappenStance Press) was shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2016. A collection of prose poems, The Late Guest  is forthcoming from Parthian Books.