About the Festival...

Since its inaugural year in 1984, the festival is held annually during the first week of October in Trois Rivières, Quebec, Canada.
During the ten-day festival, over 450 events are planned for 80 or more venues around town, including cafés, bars, restaurants, brasseries, art galleries, theatres, and museums.

The festival, showcasing some 150 poets from 30 countries spanning 5 continents, has become a truly unique and inimitable experience.

For the past 17 years, more than 85 countries have sent not only poets but also publishers keen on negotiating deals (for translation and co-edition) and inviting poets from Quebec and elsewhere to be published in their countries or to participate at their own literary festivals. Such mutually enriching partnerships go a long way to guaranteeing a unique literary presence in Quebec. They also ensure, through reciprocity, the export of our own authors to foreign soil.

This international festival, which now attracts between 35,000 and 40,000 visitors annually, has put Trois Rivières on the map as the veritable Poetry Capital of the World.

Poetry Boardwalk 

Dreamed up by Gaston Bellemare, the Poetry Boardwalk provides tourists with an opportunity to discover their surroundings through the excerpts of 300 poems penned by Quebec authors and mounted on plaques on city walls.

Following their stroll, tourists may drop their own original poem into a poetry box set aside to collect the unique voices of all who have crossed there.

Every year, these poems are collected onto a diskette and placed by the “Monument to the Unknown Poet,” located near city hall. And, Trois Rivières can truthfully boast that it is the only city that honours all the world’s poets on Valentine’s Day, when its mayor makes his annual trek to lay flowers at the monument.