Pressure on Burnham over female poet

Pressure is being placed on Downing Street and Buckingham Palace to make the next Poet Laureate a woman for the first in the position's 300-year history. As part of a well-orchestrated campaign, Chloe Garner, director of the Ledbury Poetry Festival, has written an open letter to the Queen, Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Culture Secretary Andy Burnham (pictured), putting forward her arguments for why there should be, in effect, an all-woman shortlist for the position.

She writes: "There has been no female poet laureate since the Royal household created the formal position for John Dryden in 1668. Nothing in the rules actually debars women and there are many splendid female poets from all generations writing and performing in Britain today." She said there was nothing new about women poets being as talented as their male counterparts - Sylvia Plath, Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, for example – but they had been consistently overlooked.

"From the ancient Greek poet Sappho onwards, women have often been drawn to poetry as an art form... There has never been a female Poet Laureate – there have been female monarchs for centuries, there has been a female prime minister in Britain, and a female currently running for president in America. Women are beginning to wonder why, when prestigious roles such as Poet Laureate are being handed out, one sex is consistently left empty-handed."

The position comes up for grabs this October, when the current holder, Andrew Motion, ends his 10-year tenure. The Scottish poet Carol Ann Duffy was a favourite for the job back in 1998, but her status then as the mother of a young child and as a woman in a lesbian relationship made her wary of taking up such a prominent national position. It was also suggested that Tony Blair, then Prime Minister, vetoed Duffy because he was concerned about her domestic arrangements.

Today, things look different. Duffy's daughter, Ella, is almost a teenager and her relationship with her fellow Scottish poet, Jackie Kay, has ended. She has built on the success of her 1993 collection, Mean Time, which won both the Whitbread and Forward prizes. Burnham's response to Garner's letter is cautious: "This is a timely opportunity to stimulate public interest in the role of the poet laureate and poetry in general. I am keen to encourage public engagement and debate about the art form and the festival will provide a valuable forum for discussion on the topic."