Poetry Africa will mark its 30th edition this October with five days of performances, poetry slams, workshops, industry conversations, and literary programming across Durban, culminating in the 5th World Poetry Slam Championship.

Presented by the Centre for Creative Arts at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, the festival runs from October 5 to 9, 2026, with the Durban Playhouse Theatre serving as its principal venue alongside locations across the city. The World Poetry Slam Championship will bring 40 slam poets from 40 countries and five continents to Durban for a week of competition.

The anniversary edition takes place against the backdrop of several significant moments in South Africa’s history. Fifty years after the 1976 Soweto Youth Uprising, and three decades after the first public hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the adoption of the country’s 1996 Constitution, Poetry Africa’s 2026 programme turns its attention to questions of voice, memory, freedom, and who gets to speak.

Centre for Creative Arts Director Ismail Mahomed describes the festival as part of an ongoing national conversation about expression and visibility.

“1976, 1996, the TRC represent an unfinished conversation about who gets to speak and be heard in this country,” he says. “Poetry Africa exists to keep that conversation alive, because freedom of expression is a responsibility we renew every time a poet takes the stage.”

For curator Siphindile Hlongwa, those historical moments also provide the foundation for this year’s theme, “Every Word a Street, Every Voice a City.”

“Every one of these anniversaries is really about a voice: a generation’s, a nation’s, a poet’s,” she says. “This year’s theme asks what we build when those voices are finally given room.”

The festival opens at the Playhouse Drama Theatre with South African poet Lebo Mashile as host and Koleka Putuma, the 2026 Featured Poet, delivering the keynote. The opening programme also features performances by Ana More of Ukraine, Haroun Amri of Algeria, Nanda of Gabon, and South African poet Steel the Poet.

The evening will also honour Dr. Gcina Mhlophe with a Lifetime Achievement award and feature a performance by Jamaican-Canadian dub poet and playwright D’bi Young Anitafrika, a three-time Dora Award winner known for the Sankofa Trilogy and for founding Toronto’s Watah Theatre.

For younger poets, opening night will also host the Chalkboard Slam Competition, Poetry Africa’s spoken-word competition for high school learners.

The festival’s competitive programme continues throughout the week. The Poetry Africa National Slam Jam will hold its semi-finals and final on October 6, before the World Poetry Slam Championship takes over the programme from October 7 to 9, progressing through quarter-finals and semi-finals to the final.

Beyond the stage, the festival’s industry programme brings together conversations on the practical and political dimensions of a life in poetry. Sessions will explore sustainability and longevity in poetic practice, artist mobility, contracts and rights, queer poetics, professional branding, and the role of technology in contemporary poetry. The programme also includes a book launch for Thando Fuze’s Fluent in the Language of Burial.

The festival closes with Water, a staged production developed from Koleka Putuma’s celebrated 2016 poem of the same name. The poem, which won the PEN South Africa Student Writing Prize, examines access to water as a political and racialized inheritance. The Poetry Africa production extends those questions into a broader meditation on ownership, belonging, ecological and climate justice, and the ports, trade routes, and nightlife economies that shape who is permitted to belong and where.

Founded in 1997, Poetry Africa has grown into one of the continent’s longest-running international poetry festivals. Presented by UKZN’s Centre for Creative Arts, the festival brings together published and spoken-word poets from South Africa and around the world for performances, poetry exchanges, school and campus programmes, open mics, book launches, panel discussions, and slam competitions.

Over three decades, the festival has also positioned poetry as a space for thinking through social change, while contributing to the study and scholarship of contemporary poetry at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

The full 2026 programme is available at the Poetry Africa website, with tickets available through Webtickets.