Press room

The inaugural Voiced: The Festival for Endangered Languages takes over London’s Barbican Centre in October 2025, highlighting endangered global and local languages through a creative festival. The Barbican, London will be filled with an explosion of voices and works highlighting some of the world’s most endangered languages and dialects, with new commissions and work by new voices from around the world. 

With some languages close to desolation, Voiced will also be a joyous, celebration showing how they are being saved. 

Through poetry, music, visual art, performance, talks and live events including workshops and free spaces, the festival brings together living and ancient languages, dialects and scripts with a remarkable line-up of global artists; brilliantly highlighting the vast creative impact art has on language and language has on art.

The festival is co-curated by artist Sam Winston and poet Chris McCabe, “Having worked individually on endangered language projects from establishing the Endangered Poetry Project (National Poetry Library) to writing the picture book One and Everything and editing Poems from the Edge of Extinction, we asked each other why there wasn't a creative festival for unheard languages in the UK? So, we made Voiced happen! The first UK festival to showcase the incredible creative work of poets, writers, visual and sound artists and musicians who draw power from their indigenous languages to move, surprise and excite audiences throughout our islands and beyond. This festival brings these essential voices together for a ten-day explosion of creative multilingualism across London’s Barbican Centre”. 

Karena Johnson, Head of Creative Collaboration at the Barbican said, “We are excited to collaborate with Sam and Chris to welcome this line-up of incredible artists from around the UK and the world, to share and amplify their voices. We are celebrating the power of language and art to locate who we are, from our history to our culture to dreams for the future. Whether in this country, or on the front line of climate change, communities are fighting to survive and keep their shared identity alive. The Barbican is holding this vital space and inviting audiences to explore and share their own experiences of connection, home and hope”.

Voiced promises to introduce audiences to new ways of thinking about and engaging with language, with a set of five new poetry commissions about what ‘home’ means at its heart. London-based Filipino poet Troy Cabida, the National Poet of Wales Hanan Issa, Canadian Inuktitut writer Norma Dunning, Belarusian poet Hanna Komar and Amajagh poet and painter Hawad, who writes in the Tamajaght language, have each created new works in their personal endangered and minority languages, showing how both landscape and language diversity is under tremendous pressure to survive. 

For more information, please download the full announcement press release from the sidebar.

Images can be downloaded here.