Israeli and Palestinian poets will be on the bill at an international poetry festival later this year as part of the Cultural Olympiad.

Anat Zecharya, a Tel Aviv-born writer and photographer, will be one of the up to 204 poets from Olympic nations taking part in the week-long celebration of verse at the Southbank Centre.

Ms Zecharya, whose first poetry collection was published in 2008, has won Tel Aviv's Poetry in the Streets Prize twice.

She will be joined at the event, running from June 26 to July 1, by Rafeef Ziadah, a Palestinian spoken-word artist and anti-Israel political activist who lectures at the School of African and Oriental Studies. She is a member of the international Israeli Apartheid Week co-ordinating committee and a founding member of the Toronto-based Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid.

Ms Ziadah, who is a secretariat member of the Palestinian BDS National Committee, chaired an Israel Apartheid Week event at UCL in February.