About
Why Dobunni?
The Dobunni Poetry Festival 2026 is Stroud’s first dedicated poetry festival, creating a cultural home for writers, readers, and audiences of all ages.
Stroud is a town rich in creativity, a place known for its independent spirit, its artistic communities across disciplines and its deep connection to landscape and radical thought.
We chose the name Dobunni to root the festival firmly in the landscape and history of this part of Gloucestershire. The Dobunni were an Iron Age tribe whose territory covered much of what is now the Severn Vale, the Cotswolds, and the Five Valleys - including Stroud. Their presence shaped the rural character of this region long before modern boundaries existed, leaving traces in archaeology, place names and the deep cultural memory of the land.
By naming the festival after the Dobunni, we’re honouring a lineage of creativity and connection to place. It signals that this is a festival grown from the ground up - shaped by the people who live and work here, attentive to the rural territory that has always held stories, and committed to celebrating the voices that rise from it today.
The name anchors the festival in a specific geography and heritage, while opening a space for contemporary writers to explore what it means to belong to and live with this landscape now.
The festival will run across two days, 16–17 October 2026, bringing together headline poets of national standing with the exceptional local talent already thriving in the Five Valleys and across Gloucestershire. We aim to create a platform where emerging and established voices can share work side by side, strengthening the region’s literary ecosystem and giving Stroud the kind of cultural infrastructure it deserves.
At its heart, the Dobunni Poetry Festival is about access, opportunity, and belonging. We want to build a festival that feels open to everyone - from young people discovering poetry for the first time to older writers who have never had a space to share their work publicly. Stroud has a vibrant poetry community, but it lacks a central event where people can gather, connect, learn, and feel part of something larger. This festival will provide that anchor.
A map showing the territory of the Dobunni tribe overlayed in red in the context of the modern county boundaries of England and Wales. Source: Wikimedia Commons © Public Domain.
A Dobunni coin. Source: Français : Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Monnaies, médailles et antiques, BnF 9545 (GAU-10066) © Public Domain.
Meet the team
JLM Morton
JLM Morton’s is co-director of Dialect. Her poetry has appeared on BBC6 Music, in Poetry Review, Poetry London, Rialto, Magma, Mslexia and elsewhere. She’s won the Geoffrey Dearmer and Laurie Lee prizes and was highly commended by the Forward Prizes. Her debut collection is Red Handed (2024). Her second, Borrowed Ground, is forthcoming August 2026.
Emma Kernahan
Emma is co-director of Dialect and is a short fiction and comedy writer with a background in support work.
Jason Conway
Jason is a professional daydreamer, director of the Gloucestershire Poetry Society and Editor of Steel Jackdaw Magazine. Originally from Staffordshire, he relocated to Gloucestershire in 2008 and fell in love with Stroud. He lives and works in the town as an award-winning multidisciplinary autistic creative. Jason is a published author and poet with a deep connection to nature. You can often find him exploring the local area in contemplation, admiring its rural beauty and its many juxtapositions.