University of KwaZulu Natal’s Centre for Creative Arts revealed the Poetry Africa programme for its 30th festival, running from 5 to 9 October 2026 at the Durban Playhouse Theatre and venues across the city. Over the week, the festival will bring together stage performances, poetry slams, industry panels, workshops and a schools programme, anchored by the 5th World Poetry Slam Championship, which brings 40 slam poets from 40 nations and five continents to Durban.

This year’s edition lands alongside a cluster of significant anniversaries: 50 years since the 1976 Soweto Youth Uprising, 30 years since the first public hearings of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and 30 years since the adoption of the 1996 Constitution (including Section 16’s guarantee of freedom of expression and creative freedom).

The festival opens at the Playhouse Drama Theatre with a programme hosted by South African poet Lebo Mashile, featuring a keynote address from 2026 Featured Poet Koleka Putuma and performances from Ana More (Ukraine), Haroun Amri (Algeria), Nanda (Gabon), Steel the Poet (South Africa), Lifetime Achievement honouree Dr Gcina Mhlophe, and celebrated Jamaican-Canadian dub poet and playwright D’bi Young Anitafrika, a three-time Dora Award winner known for her Sankofa Trilogy and for founding the Watah Theatre in Toronto. The same evening includes the Chalkboard Slam Competition, Poetry Africa’s spoken-word initiative for high school learners.

The Poetry Africa National Slam Jam runs its semi-finals and final on Tuesday 6 October. The World Poetry Slam Championship then progresses through quarter-finals, semi-finals and a final from Wednesday 7 to Friday 9 October.

Alongside the performances, Poetry Africa’s industry programme features panel discussions and workshops marking 30 years of the festival, sustainability and longevity in poetry practice, artist mobility, contracts and rights, queer poetics, professional branding, and technology in poetry, together with a book launch for Thando Fuze’s Fluent in the Language of Burial.

Closing day features a staged production of Water, developed from Koleka Putuma’s celebrated 2016 poem of the same name, which won the PEN South Africa student writing prize and is widely taught for its meditation on access to water as a political and racialised inheritance. The Poetry Africa staging extends that work into a meditation on ownership, belonging, ecological and climate justice, and the ports, trade routes and nightlife economies that shape who gets to belong where.

The full programme can be found on poetryafrica.ukzn.ac.za. tickets are available on Webtickets.