Carcanet author Bill Manhire will be the poet-in-residence at this year's Ledbury Poetry Festival. The festival runs 29 June to 8 July, and more information and tickets are available from their website.

Bill Manhire was born in Invercargill in 1946. He was his country's inaugural Poet Laureate and has won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry four times. He holds a personal chair at the Victoria University of Wellington, where he directs the celebrated creative writing programme and the International Institute of Modern Letters. His volume of short fiction, South Pacific, was published by Carcanet in 1994, and his latest collection, Lifted, was published in 2007.