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STAnza, Scotland’s international poetry festival will be filling venues in St Andrews, Fife from 6-10 March 2013. The issue of  venues must have been a fraught one this year with the sudden closure of the Byre Theatre but every event, with the exception of one exhibition, is going ahead. Eleanor Livingstone, festival director explains: ‘The Town Hall in Queens Gardens, which has always been our secondary hub in all its Victorian Gothic grandeur, has risen to the challenge and will become this year’s primary hub.’

Poets from around the world will be performing in the Fife town and highlights include comic poet John Hegley (pictured above and poem below) and Dunfermline-born TS Eliot prize winner, John Burnside (pictured below).

An ending of the re-offending

For the prisoner paying the price
just a punishment may not suffice.
The best use of Time
may be learning to rhyme,
making sure that it isn’t too nice
a process of course.
You don’t want people thinking a life of crime
Leads to loads of free poetry workshops.

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