Last Monday, Sir John Tavener appeared on Radio 4's Start the Week. Its host reflects on the composer's wit and wisdom

• Read Nico Muhly's tribute to his fellow composer

Sir John Tavener has been an eerie and challenging presence in our national life for many decades. I met him only a few days ago when he came in to talk about George Herbert, the great English poet, for Radio 4's Start the Week. He was frail, yes, but carried with him a blazing intelligence and cheerful serenity.

The floating cloud of hair, the long, lined, noble face and the deliberate speech were all exactly as expected. He was kindly, without a trace of pomposity - and funnier than I expected. He fed biscuits to his small son who was racing around the studio. The puzzle was that Sir John, who could seem like an official wizard clasped to the bosom of the establishment, was also a hugely popular Beatles-era artist with a distinctly radical streak. His early music was considered anti-establishment, even revolutionary.

And for such a figure of intimidating spiritual authority, his background could hardly be less expected – a family of builders from Wembley.

There can be very few people in this country who have never heard his music, even if only The Protecting Veil and Song for Athene. In terms of reach, he was the most important composer of serious music left in these islands, but his appeal could not have been more direct or irresistible. Friends who know far more than I do tell me he was a highly sophisticated and complex musician. Clearly, he was great enough and confident enough to hide it. The confidence came, without doubt, from his strong religious views. Nobody can begin to deal with Tavener's achievement without starting there.

Our conversation was about George Herbert's poetry and why it is that religious forms – poetry and music both – still seem so important in such a secular age. Jeanette Winterson, a one-time Pentecostalist, responded that it was "the vexed question about how the soul can adapt to the world that is always in flux" It wasn't, she said, that the soul was static but: "The soul is a part of us that even the most secular person can understand – we know what we mean when we say 'someone's got soul' or something is 'soulless'." There was "this rather lonely part of ourselves which is the soul … life has an inside as well as an outside."

Tavener nodded vigorously. He was greatly seized by the fact that Herbert frequently uses the word love where another poet would say "God". He had been working on Dante and he quoted the poet's famous words: "All my thoughts speak of love."

Sir John's spiritual journey began as a Presbyterian but, after taking in the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox traditions, seemed to be heading towards Eastern metaphysics. We were at the end, he told us, of the Kali-Yugo, which in the Hindu scriptures means the long age of darkness, corruption and vice. (Guardian readers who find their eyes rolling at this point might reflect that, according to the Scriptures, this age is supposed to be characterised by "unfair taxation"; a belief that sexual intercourse is the most important thing in life; and an obsession with drink and drugs. There is no actual mention of Russell Brand or even of David Dimbleby's tattoo, but still, as the youth put it, "just saying".)

At any rate, he proposed that the end of this period would be characterised by a "recovery of the sacred in a new form" in which everybody rediscovered their inner selves. He himself was moving towards breaking down religious boundaries – he composed a piece about the 99 names of God in Arabic according to Islam, performed, controversially, in a Roman Catholic cathedral. Although he still considered himself an Orthodox Christian, he quoted his early Presbyterian pastor who once told him: "Life is a creeping tragedy; that's why we must be cheerful."

The challenge he proposed is not remote, I'd suggest, from daily life. It isn't airy-fairy or esoteric.It is simply: can we feed that lonely and inside part of ourselves that Winterson happily calls the soul, without forming into warring religious teams and going to war with one other?

As a composer, Sir John had no duty to resolve religious controversy. But for millions of people, his musical answers – those soaring chords, those weightless, timeless periods – proposed an optimistic "yes". That's the power of art. And as an artist, he really was a magus of great power.

Home to two literary festivals, busy book fairs, clubs and writer after writer – this is a town where people queue for poetry

To mark Krakow's appointment as Unesco City of Literature, a set of super-sized, multi-coloured letters were placed in the iconic medieval Marketlplace ("Rynek"), spelling out "Krakow, City of Literature" in Polish ("Miasto literatury"). Overnight, the citizens demonstrated their creative spirit by rearranging the letters to form messages of their own (some not fit to be printed).

Krakow lives and breathes literature. No city could be more eminently qualified for the Unesco title, which is now in its seventh year, with Edinburgh and Norwich among previous recipients. It's hard to imagine how it can add to its existing plethora of literary events: it hosts two annual international literary festivals, a book fair, and any number of poetry readings; it is home to the Polish Book Institute– a superb public organisation which exists to promote Polish literature at home and abroad. It's also home to several publishing houses, from old and traditional to young and ground-breaking.

Krakow's literary residents have included the Nobel prize-winning poets Czesław Miłosz and Wisława Szymborska, science fiction writer Stanisław Lem and satirical playwright Sławomir Mrożek. Its living, internationally acclaimed poets include Adam Zagajewski and Ewa Lipska.

Literary Krakow has much to offer foreign visitors as well as Poles. The Conrad festival, and the Miłosz festival, held in October and May respectively, regularly present authors from all over the world, with past heavyweights including Seamus Heaney (who had many close friends here), Orhan Pamuk, Zadie Smith, Robert Hass and Adonis. The city has many ideal venues for cultural events – theatres, museums, medieval churches, restored synagogues, and atmospheric cafes, all within walking distance of the Rynek. Whenever a festival is in full swing, the whole city reverberates with poetry and music – they even project poems onto the 700-year-old town hall tower.

There are plenty of less official ways to enjoy literature in Krakow all year round, whether you know Polish or not. It is the best place to indulge in a bookshop crawl – even the passageway under the station platforms is lined with secondhand book stalls – and the English-language Massolit bookshop, café and venue is a book-lover's dream. Enter one of the cafes in the little streets off the Rynek or a bar in the old Jewish district of Kazimierz, and you're likely to see somebody sitting over a laptop writing a poem or a novel. Stay until evening and you might hear them reading it out – not least at the monthly "Talking Dog", where writers and performers are invited to talk about anything they like for a maximum of five minutes, as five red light bulbs go off in turn to mark the end of each minute. An English-language edition is being launched on 21 November at the Piękny Pies – "Beautiful Dog" – night club.

This event comes out of a Krakow tradition of combining literature and performance, which has always been encouraged by the many writers who have lived there. Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska – who referred to her award as "the Stockholm Tragedy" and retained the irreverent spirit of a schoolgirl until her death at 88 – was a regular instigator of unusual creative activities such as rude limerick competitions and lotteries offering bizarre jumble-sale prizes. In her youth she lived in the Writers' House on Krupnicza Street, set up after the war as a refuge for authors displaced from ruined Warsaw and elsewhere; just about every successful Polish writer stayed there at some time.

One important fixture was the Piwnica Pod Baranami cabaret, where scientists mixed with artists. In its heyday, the eminent physician and essayist Andrzej Szczeklik regularly played the piano there, while historian Norman Davies (a part-time resident of Krakow) played his accordion, and the great philosopher Leszek Kołakowski sang arias from famous operas. Rather than dampen Krakow's performing spirit, the constraints of communism fanned its flames; in the days of censorship, a banned literary journal was defiantly read aloud in a church each month. The genius behind it was the poet Bronisław Maj, whose post-communist contributions to Krakow literary life include dressing in a headscarf and pinny to deliver the inimitable monologues of Pani Lola, the cloakroom attendant at the Writers' Union, who revealed all the great writers' most intimate secrets, and her own crucial, Muse-like role in their literary success.

Oddly, as Adam Zagajewski points out in a short film made to coincide with Krakow's new role, there is no great novel about Krakow (yet), though it has inspired numerous short stories and poems by Poles and others. More than anything, it's a city that prompts unforgettable shared moments. When, after many years in exile, Czesław Miłosz came to live in Krakow in the 1990s, his presence prompted a unique gathering of 18 poets from east and west, including Paul Muldoon, Tomas Transtromer, Tomas Venclova, K Williams and Natalia Gorbanevskaya. After several well received readings, the poets went to a café in the marketplace, where each occupied a separate table to sign books and chat to their readers. To the organisers' amazement, a huge queue formed. "What are you queuing for?" asked curious passers-by. "For the poets," they heard, and joined the queue.

Should literary promoters take a leaf out of Simon Cowell's book?

With authors grumbling about giving their time for free and television executives becoming increasingly suspicious of the value of traditional books broadcasting, literary events in the UK are moving steadily into the edgier territory of bookslams and literary death matches. But belly-achers beware: if developments in Italy and Peru are anything to go by, the future looks much more extreme.

On Sunday, the Italian channel Rai3 will launch Masterpiece, a virtual reality show in which aspiring authors will compete in literary challenges for a major book deal.

The series was developed with FremantleMedia, best known for shows such as American Idol and China's Got Talent, so humiliation is bound to be just a keystroke away for at least one of four contestants picked from a host of hopeful applicants to speed-write on a subject of the programme-maker's choice – their efforts beamed on to a screen above their heads.

A different sort of humiliation is on offer for wannabe writers in Peru, who have to undergo much the same sort of torture in fancy dress. Their challenge is to write a short story in five minutes from three random words, with the loser obliged to unmask at the end of the session. Again they do their stuff on laptops hooked up to a gigantic screen. And again, the prize is a book contract.

Literature as spectator sport is hardly new. The Arab world's answer to Pop Idol is so successful that the biennial seasons of weekly, live, three-hour programmes – made in Abu Dhabi – are said to have a multinational audience of 17 million. The participants are not pop stars but poets, who have to be experts in Nabati, the "people's poetry" of the Arab peninsula. Fame and fortune are guaranteed for the winners for Poet of Millions, though sadly Nabati experts in search of celebrity will have to wait another two years if they haven't yet enrolled, as entries for the sixth series have just closed.

Public verse-speaking and composing are all very well, but surely it's only a matter of time before some Japanese TV producer persuades aspiring writers to compose in a coffin full of maggots. So ask yourself. Have you got what it takes to become the next Murakami?

This collaboration between a haunted war photographer and a poet is a masterpiece of truthfulness and feeling

This book, which has just been awarded the Fenton Aldeburgh prize for best first collection, is the result of a collaboration between Canadian war reporter Paul Watson, who won the Pulitzer prize in 1993 for his photograph of a dead US airman being dragged, mutilated, through the streets of Mogadishu, and American poet and playwright Dan O'Brien. Its origins lie in a play O'Brien wrote called The Body of an American, in which two characters, Paul Watson and Dan O'Brien, explore Watson's haunting by the airman he has photographed. That haunting is the theme of this book, too, and stands for all the hauntings of war. In the first poem, "The War Reporter Paul Watson Hears the Voice", we are taken brutally and yet with a powerful interiority to the centre of the dilemma:

And I hear a voice
both in my head and out. If you do this,
I will own you forever. I'm sorry
but I have to. If you do this, I will
own you. I'm sorry, I'm not trying to
desecrate your memory. If you do this
I will own you forever. I took his
picture. While they were beating his body
and cheering.

The shift from being owned to owning is done so starkly that we almost fail to notice the subtlety of the pivot on which the book turns: a one-man dialogue that is also a two-man monologue. What is remarkable about the way O'Brien (and Watson, whose notes and journals O'Brien uses) handles the material is the immediacy and viscerality of it all, even though the book is also about the various removes at which war is experienced: the soldier, the reporter, the image, the reality, the witness and the actor.

War Reporter is written throughout in these short lines and staccato sentences, the humour as well as the seriousness deadpan, with the majority of poem titles beginning "The War Reporter Paul Watson …". There's a relentlessness that masterfully navigates between numbness and pain, and a disturbing correlation between the click of the shutter and the pull of the trigger. The great second world war poet Keith Douglas comes to mind – "Now in my dial of glass appears the soldier who is going to die" ("How to Kill"). The technology of warfare, with aerial bombings, drones and missiles, is never less murderous for being conducted at a distance, and the reporter and poet, too, are caught between objectivity (the French for camera lens is objectif) and involvement. As in Douglas, there is pity, but it is weathered and brutalised and riven with guilt; Watson, through O'Brien, understands the dangerous pull, but also perhaps the necessity, of desensitisation. In "The War Reporter Paul Watson Imagines His Father", the photographer recalls holding his father's gun and imagining "I was the man who pulled the trigger like/ I take my pictures now".

In one of the most disturbing poems, "The War Reporter Paul Watson's Cold Open", a party of reporters and photographers – Watson, a "sexy photographer" and a French "war junkie" – are attacked in Afghanistan. A grenade lands at the feet of the Frenchman:

Fumbling the door open
wide he's scissoring his boots like a danseur
in a sidelong entrechat, till the blast
severs both legs at mid-thigh.

The westerners are evacuated, but the Afghan driver (his body burned and his arm "an unearthed bone") is not: "The cherubic / commander protests he's not allowed to / bring Afghans home. So our heroes leave him / smoldering in the smoldering cab as shadows / approach like men". "That night", we read, "the reporter and the photographer / fuck like rabbits. Stoned on hash, drunk on death / choosing them." The hard factuality of the reportage dissimulates the depth of its insight: the jolt of "drunk on death" becomes the subtler and more ambiguous "drunk on death choosing them".

The final poem, "The Reporter Paul Watson is Forgiven", is written as a dialogue between Watson and the dead airman's brother:

I hope
this won't upset you too much but one thing
that still haunts me is that I heard a voice
when I took that picture, and your brother
warned me, If you do this I will own you
forever. Well how do you know David
meant something bad? He said I will own you
forever – Maybe he meant you owe him
something now. Like what?

There are no italics to designate who speaks, so it's possible that this is an internal monologue. The "haunting" may or may not be laid to rest, but the poem movingly describes both the photographer's guilt and the bravery of the bereaved, with their lives both ongoing and holed. It is an affecting conclusion, not least because, perhaps as a sort of laying to rest, it is also the first time the dead airman is named.

This is a book of doubles too: poet and photographer, photographer and airman, soldier and civilian, gunsight and lens. It is a masterpiece of truthfulness and feeling, and a completely sui generis addition not just to writing about war but to contemporary poetry. It is published by the equally sui generis CB Editions, who in their six years of existence have already contributed immeasurably to the quality and variety of poetry publishing today.

• Patrick McGuinness's The Last Hundred Days is published by Seren.

Grace Nichols's children's poetry is filled with wonder, ordinariness and a kind, auntly wisdom

What poems are loved by children? Or, rather, what poems are loved by adults for children? The Opies' Oxford Book of Children's Verse begins with an admonitory poem by Chaucer advising children to control their tongues, and ends with another by Ogden Nash in the form of a prayer. Adults are in control here. But in between we have fun and yarns and wonder. There is also memorableness, the mnemonic glory of rhyme and regularity, which can be both soothing and uproariously funny. The shaping of your mouth, lips, teeth and tongue in the enterprise of getting the sounds out. This is the child's own experiential concern. But all this is glorious. All this is fun.

Grace Nichols is a major figure among children's poets. She first came to notice with her adult book, I Is a Long-Memoried Woman, which won the Commonwealth poetry prize in 1977, and she has written plenty of books for adults since then. Her latest children's book title, Cosmic Disco, points at stars and dancing, but we also have the seasons, ideas, nature, dads and school. It is the sky that dominates, the mysteries of those vast terrifying spaces remaining mysterious yet somehow intimate.

"Only you Sun / came with your shimmering dance" she writes in "Sun, You're a Star". In another poem, "A Matter of Holes", she wonders:

As for those crab-tracks
Across the cosmic shore
Who know where they'll take us -
What those black holes have in store?

The child's half-understandings and enthusiasms are engaged through the half-familiarities of mice, moles, foxes and miners. Knowledge for a child is not all first-hand, not even second-hand. It is all the hands, real and imaginary, one comes across.

Sometimes it is not even knowledge – it is simply rhythm, as in "Round".

Round the ripples
of pebble-in-pond
never square or oblong
Round the orange
Round the plum 
Round the moon of my Mum's
when-she-was-getting-me-tum.

The rhythm isn't simple: it is a matter of pace and breath, the syncopation and slowing of the third line as it is said. You have to say it aloud to get it and enjoy it.

If wonder lies at the heart of the book, there are also relationships, ordinariness and a kind auntly wisdom: sadness at the death of a boy with peritonitis, bemusement at the folly of Sally Size-Zero, a generous amusement at Dad dancing and Dad‑the-hero catching a spider in his daughter's room, melancholy at the offence of captive performing beasts, and a huffing pleasure at the comfort of cats when ill.

If adults like the book it will be because it is a gently tutelary adult playing with children. Once I thought some books were too much with the kids, too much "I am one of you". But that too is vital. Children like being in the swing of things. They like rushing around in a high wind. They like biffing things and being biffed. They are assured in their terrors by being together. The solitary child is not, as I once thought, the measure of the world.

Cosmic Disco, at its most characteristic, is one voice speaking to one pair of ears at a time, that circle of ears opening and widening.

John Greening's translation of a German poet's experience in the first world war sets the raw colour of combat against the ghostly shadows that followed

This week's poem is John Greening's translation of "On the Eastern Front" by Georg Trakl. The original poem "Im Osten" (which follows the English here) was probably written in the aftermath of the Battle of Grodek. Trakl, a pharmacist with the medical corps, had been left alone with a barn full of wounded soldiers and few medical supplies. The line "ghost casualties heave" conveys some sense of that ghastly scene.

"On the Eastern Front" appears in John Greening's newly-published collection To the War Poets, an interesting fusion of original poems, including a series of verse-letters to assorted Britsh first world war poets, and translations from the work of four of their German counterparts. The Trakl translations in particular introduce vivid contrasting motifs into the pattern of the book.

Trakl's enormous visual drama demands compression from the English quatrain. Greening has a very different poetic sensibility, intellectual and urbane, but his sense of a word's etymological weight and range of cultural reference is a good qualification for conveying the terse, sonorous intensity of Trakl. The word "mad" in the first line's "mad organ playing" gives the uncontrolled abandon of the winter storm a pathological dimension, and suggests that war itself may be madness. It's a bold, apt choice to retain the German Volk in line two, a word which, even in the pre-Nazi era, carried nationalistic freight. The conventional view of the Great War is that helpless men were used as canon-fodder.

Trakl's line gives agency to the men: their "dark fury" expresses a passionate personal investment in an identity bigger than one war. Similarly, "defoliated" connects with the chemical devastation of a conflict nearer our own time – the Vietnam War.

Further intensification re-colours the "tidal wave of onslaught". An impossible blend, the violent visual oxymoron, "black-red", has a harsher effect in English than the original "purple". But red and black are certainly colours associated with Trakl.

The reference to night's "smashed features" gains thrust from the monosyllabic adjective "smashed" – which as well as meaning "violently broken" can, in colloquial English usage, be a synonym for "drunk". It's simply a hint that hovers and perhaps recalls the mad organ-playing. The motherly, goddess-like figure of night, half-shattered but silver-armed, seems vast and potent. Her image rises above the reader, seen from the perspective of the fallen men, the "ghost casualties" dead or dying under the trees. Qualified only by "November's", Greening's "ash" evokes both the tree and cremation, and finds a distant, hushing rhyme with "smashed".

By turning the symbol of femininity, the moon, into the hunter of women, Trakl tips the Romantic tradition on its face. The realism of "blood-spattered doorsteps" only compounds the horror. As in a nightmare, the women are "petrified" – turned to stone and unable to run.

In the small compass of this last quatrain, Greening's "no-man's-land" brings the war pressingly close to the town. The tautology of "wild wolves" is avoided: "grey" links them to ghostliness, ash, shadows – those elements in the poem which take us beyond the vibrant colours of war to ultimate faceless, voiceless grey. But first there will be more destruction: the wolves "have forced the gates".

Trakl is only indirectly present in his poem. The three stanzas depict three iconic stages of battle: the fury of combat, the heaving aftermath of the wounded and dying, and finally the devastation leaching outwards to the civilians. These images are not frozen in 1914, and the translator's word-choices help extend the implicit universality.

Greening says of his translations that "the aim was to set German words to English music". He hasn't "re-invented the poems in the manner of Lowell or Pound", but he has re-shaped them "where appropriate". He cites his transformation of "Dornige Wildnis", which Christopher Middleton translates as "thorny wilderness", into "a spiky no-man's-land" so that "the spikes might evoke German helmets as well as barbed wire and brambles … and the whole line carry (through its 'o' sounds) the chill wind of the east". His procedure bears out the view that the translator's task is not to mimic the original but to find new effects within a larger fidelity. As Greening says, "Trakl uses different effects; but he learnt on a different instrument".

To the War Poets will be launched at Kimbolton Castle at 7.30pm on 22 November and the poet will also be reading from the collection at Lumen in north Londond on 17 December. He is currently editing a new edition of Edmund Blunden's Undertones of War for OUP.

On the Eastern Front

The winter storm's mad organ playing
is like the Volk's dark fury,
the black-red tidal wave of onslaught,
defoliated stars.

Her features smashed, her arms silver,
night calls to the dying men,
beneath shadows of November's ash,
ghost casualties heave.

A spiky no-man's-land encloses the town.
The moon hunts petrified women
from their blood-spattered doorsteps.
Grey wolves have forced the gates.

Im Osten

Den wilden Orgeln des Wintersturms
Gleicht des Volkes finstrer Zorn,
Die purpurne Woge der Schlacht,
Entlaubter Sterne.

Mit zerbrochnen Brauen, silbernen Armen
Winkt sterbenden Soldaten die Nacht.
Im Schatten der herbstlichen Esche
Seufzen die Geister der Erschlagenen.

Dornige Wildnis umgürtet die Stadt.
Von blutenden Stufen jagt der Mond
Die erschrockenen Frauen.
Wilde Wölfe brachen durchs Tor.

If the phrase 'greatest living poet in the English language' has any meaning, then we should use it to describe Hill

The 1985 edition of Geoffrey Hill's Collected Poems was, by comparison with this, a very slender thing. We had reason, then, to assume that there would not be much more: he had been ill, and depressed; and what is the productive life span of a poet anyway, especially one whose subject, so often, is "the tongue's atrocities", the culpability of words and the responsibility to use them with immense and utmost care, if at all? The next 13 years of silence, apart from lectures, would have encouraged such pessimism. And then, from Canaan (1996) onwards, the dam burst; there were nine collections after that. By the time the 1985 collection ends in this volume, we have a further 800-odd pages to go. If there is a paperback or second edition of his Collected Poems next year, will it be a third as long again as this one? (Remember Hill's epigraph to "Hymns to Our Lady of Chartres" – "As Henry Adams observed at Chartres, the twin powers of the modern world are inertia and velocity" – and note that inertia makes things hard to stop, as well as hard to start.)

From the word go, Hill gave some of his readers problems with his style, which, to use the most boring word about it, is "difficult", and there was some small, perplexed part of me that hoped one of the reasons this book is so big is that the answers are printed in the back. The editor of the 1960 Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse, Kenneth Allott, in argument with Hill about which of his poems to include (Hill apparently objected to the inclusion of "In Memoriam Jane Frazer" on the grounds of its "coy last stanza", and of "The White Ship" because of its "shaky technique"), said of the poem finally chosen: "I understand 'Annunciations' only in the sense that cats and dogs may be said to understand human conversation, ie they grasp something by the tone of the speaking voice, but without help I cannot construe it." Hill did give help in that collection, of a kind he has been reluctant to provide in public ever since, and although his gloss is not what we might call conventionally explanatory, it provided his readers, almost from the start, with something approaching a key to how to read him.

"The Word (line 1) is the impulse that makes and comprehends. Poetry before the poetry-banquet ... What I say in the section is, I think, that I don't believe in the Word. The fact that I make the poem means that I still believe in words." "Annunciations" ends with the lines:

... Priests, martyrs,

Parade to this imperious theme: 'O Love,

You know what pains succeed; be vigilant; strive

To recognize the damned among your friends.

Hill says: "But I want the poem to have this dubious end; because I feel dubious; and the whole business is dubious." He's not wrong: and that sentence, balanced on the fulcrums of its semicolons, alerts us to the delicately measured nuances of these lines. Is "parade" an imperative or the present tense? (Or even a noun?) Is "Love" a person or an idea? ("Love" is, in Hill, very often the former.) Does "succeed" mean "win" or "follow on from"? And, perhaps most crucially, are we meant to keep our distance from the damned or attend to them? These deliberations we are obliged to make are, to use his words from another poem in the same collection, "poised, unanswerable"; not an abnegation of duty but an unparaphrasable recognition that these are matters we are not qualified to make a final decision on.

Which can bring us to Hill's politics. In 1985, Tom Paulin wrote for the LRB a review of a collection of essays about Hill published by the Open University in which he attacked Hill for "kitsch feudalism", and all the contributors bar one for "reverential gullibility". The very title King Log– a reference to Aesop's fable about the frogs who wanted a king – is, he asserted, "reactionary in its implications", and he berated one of the contributors for not watching Channel 4 and so realising that we live in a pluralist society. (That's an injunction that has lost its force, you feel.) The correspondence that this piece inaugurated rumbled on for 10 months. Broadly, the case against Hill tends to have been that he is too conservative, too burdened by the past, for his or our own good. Much has been made, though to no conclusive end, of the allusions to Virgil's blood-foaming Tiber made both in one of Hill's Mercian Hymns (begun in 1968) and Enoch Powell's notorious "rivers of blood" speech (also 1968).

But this is a slur by association, as even a skim-reading of Hill's verse will attest. Horror at all kinds of political violence is found throughout his work: from his most anthologised poem, "September Song", with its haunting epigraph "born 19.6.32 – deported 24.9.42" (Hill was born one day earlier), to "On Looking Through 50 Jahre im Bild: Bundesrepublik Deutschland", which ends with a description of Willy Brandt kneeling at the Warsaw ghetto memorial in 1970, and the line: "I did what people do when words fail them." That is: kneel in supplication, or in silent prayer.

Words have not failed Hill; but the long silences between his collections up to 1996 suggest that he knows what it's like when they do. Now, it seems, he can make them do what he wants, and if the phrase "greatest living poet in the English language" has any meaning, we should use it now. He has many voices, not excluding wit and playfulness. The very title of his 2000 collection Speech! Speech!– both conventional after-dinner request and surprised exclamation – is a joke. The poems inside were almost anti-lyrical, recalling the rushed-memo style, capitalised phrases and obscure references of Pound's more gnomic Cantos. "I follow MacDiarmid in desiring 'a learned poetry wholly free /Of the brutal love of ignorance'," Hill wrote in his 1986 essay collection The Enemy's Country, and some feared that he was becoming too allusive, and that the time when he could write a lyric of poignancy and grace like that from 1978's "Ave Regina Coelorum" – "There is a land called Lost / at peace inside our heads" was gone for ever. His abandonment of rhyme, for which he had an almost incomparable skill, made me fear he no longer had total mastery over what he was saying.

It was a groundless fear. The sequence Clavics (2011), with poems laid out on the page in shapes suggestive of a key, and a pair of outstretched wings, shows someone literally shaping words to his will; and the final sequence of Broken Hierarchies, "Al Tempo de' Tremuoti", is as tight and as austerely beautiful as anything he has ever done. Yet sometimes it is not austere at all:

I can see someone walking there, a girl,

And she is you, old love. Edging the meadow

The may-tree is all light and all shadow.

Coming and going are the things eternal.

You can hear in those lines many things, picked out in the simplest words. I hear in them a comprehension of destiny, of life and death, an acceptance both heartbreaking and peaceful at the same time. It would appear the answers were in the back after all.

News that Kingston-upon-Hull has won the race to be UK city of culture in 2017 has delighted those who live there

"It's not long ago that this place was in the Crap Towns book, but there has been a lot of investment and a lot of progress," said Martin Taylor, of Hull History Centre, at the news that the city had been chosen as the UK's city of culture in 2017, beating off challenges from Dundee, Leicester and Swansea. "This will be a game changer."

The Hull History Centre curates the archive of Philip Larkin, former librarian at the local university, whose poems such as Days inspired the bid. "The ambition is for each day of 2017 in Hull to showcase something individual, which will make a daily impact on the life of the city and have an impact across the country and the world," explained Taylor. "I'm sure the city will deliver something memorable, powerful and unique, much as the city is itself."

News of the award has surprised some, with Lancastrian cricketer Andrew Flintoff asking his Twitter followers: "It's not April fools today is it? Just heard on the wireless that Hull has become the British city of culture! #windup"

But Richard Heseltine, the university's current librarian, said: "Everyone who lives here has been totally engaged with the bid. I'm sure the other cities did a great job, but you could feel the energy here.

"Larkin had a reputation as a grumpy old man, but I think he would have been very pleased with this. He had enormous affection for the city and understood its strengths, and found Hull a very congenial city in which to work and write his poetry. He benefited from Hull's literary culture, which is still very strong."

"This puts the city on the map and makes Hull visible, finally," said Elaine Burke, an arts consultant. "The people that live and work here have known it for years. Hull is a really special place where magical things happen, but few people outside realised it. Everyone knows about the Humber bridge, but there's some really quirky, unusual stuff that goes on that doesn't happen anywhere else."

Burke said arts had been used to refurbish GP's surgeries and that a local businessman, Malcolm Scott, had turned one of his offices into a theatre space and recording studio. "The postwar decimation of the fishing industry has taken a huge toll on the confidence of people, so for getting people's aspirations going again the award will be absolutely huge," she said.

Chamber of Commerce member Philip Ascough said there was a "huge scream" when the result was announced. "People were preparing for the consolation that if we didn't win, there's still so much culture going on. But that's why we've won.

"It's like the parable of loaves and fishes. When we went for the city of culture, people started to realise what we had, from rock venues such as the Adelphi or Hull Truck theatre. One of the big triggers was Larkin With Toads [a public art display that was part of the festivities in 2010 marking the 25th anniversary of the poet's death], which was hugely popular and brought in money and tourism. People saw from that what the arts can do for a city and an economy."

The city's musical community – which has produced the Housemartins, DJ Norman Cook, former Hull University students Everything but the Girl and David Bowie's backing band, the Spiders from Mars – shared the celebratory and hopeful mood.

"The Spiders from Mars are hugely influential, but they haven't had the recognition," said Mark Wigan, whose Museum of Club Culture is currently holding a display of Bowie artefacts. "We've had over 30,000 people to see this exhibition, but it would be terrific if the city of culture could finally create a proper lasting tribute, such as a statue."

"For the visual arts, this is fantastic, said Andy Pea of Kingston art gallery, in the cultural hub that used to be the city's fruit market. "I was sitting holding my baby daughter when I heard. Otherwise I would have jumped for joy."

On the streets of Hull, there was similar ecstasy, despite the grey skies and rain showers.

"Hull is always regarded as a downtown city," said plasterer Martin Coultas, who has only lived in Hull for six months but found "a different thing, lots to do. I'm impressed by this place."

"I'm really excited," said bakery assistant Andrea Widdowson, dressed in her white apron and cap. "It's wonderful to think that other people will come and visit what is a nice city. If you live here, you appreciate things such as the Freedom festival in the summer and the Deep marina, where there's so much to learn about the fishing industry."

"I turned on Radio 2 this morning and Chris Evans was saying he'd never been to Hull," said Andy Farrer, who helps run the antiques and books emporium Caleb's Place in the fruit market. "But now he says he's going to come here. Becoming the city of culture will be incredible for Hull."

Valerie Eliot's collection was auctioned at her request to continue her charity's work encouraging young poets

A museum-worthy collection of British art amassed by the widow of TS Eliot has sold for more than £7m at auction, more than £2m above the pre-sale estimate.

The top sale at the auction of Valerie Eliot's collection at Christie's King Street branch in London, which totalled £7,094,950, was a pencil and water colour sketch of Helmingham Dell in Suffolk by John Constable, which went for £662,500, almost double its estimated value.

The Nobel prize-winning poet's widow funded her art and antiques collection with the royalties from Andrew Lloyd Webber's highly successful musical Cats, based on her husband's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.

Valerie Eliot died in 2012, aged 86. Her treasures – described as one of the finest collections of British art to come to the market in generations – were auctioned at her request to continue her work of encouraging young poets and artists through her charity, Old Possum's Practical Trust.

She also collected works by Thomas Gainsborough, Stanley Spencer and LS Lowry, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, along with jewellery and furniture and portrait miniatures. The sale also included works by Matisse and Picasso.

Valerie Eliot (née Fletcher) was in her Yorkshire classroom when she heard a recording of Eliot's The Journey of the Magi, and declared that she would marry the poet. She went on to work as his secretary at the publisher Faber & Faber, and married him in 1957, when she was 30 and he was 68.

After his death in 1965, she devoted her life to preserving his archive and promoting his work, editing and publishing thousands of letters, and founding, funding and annually presenting the poetry prize established in his name. None of TS Eliot's books or literary manuscripts were included in the sale.

Visualisations flowing from 28-year study of Dylan Thomas's play are part of celebrations to mark 100 years since the writer's birth

Beloved characters, scenes and dream sequences from Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood have been lovingly imagined by the pop artist Sir Peter Blake.

Over the past 28 years, Blake has been working on his visualisations of characters from Thomas's "play for voices" and for the first time his versions of figures such as the old blind seafarer, Captain Cat, and the draper, Mog Edwards, are being shown together.

The exhibition at the National Museum Cardiff is part of the launch of a year-long series of events to mark the 100th anniversary of Thomas's birth.

Having listened to the play or read it at least twice a week for the last 28 years, Blake has produced 170 visual interpretations of the work. "I was first aware of Under Milk Wood while studying at the Royal College of Art," said Blake. "The Welsh students at the college picked up on the play immediately.

"As soon as I decided to illustrate Under Milk Wood, I researched it, read it and listened to it again and again. I still play it a couple of times a week and read it once a month. I've always treated it as a separate piece of work. I work on Under Milk Wood at home in the evening. It's almost like a 'separate me' doing it."

The exhibition includes three distinct groups: portraits of the characters; a series of watercolours illustrating the dream sequences at the beginning of the play; and a third group – the largest – described as "topographical", which includes scenes and locations from the play.

The 60 detailed portraits are all pencil drawings. Blake has visualised everyone mentioned in the play's cast list. These portraits are both imaginary and real. Blake believes that a face can't be invented, and therefore that all the portraits are based on images he has found – in books or magazines.

The dreams are an integral part of Under Milk Wood as almost all the characters are introduced to the audience or reader through a moment of their dreams. There are 26 works in this sequence, each one now numbered and inscribed at the bottom with the relevant passage from the text. Using watercolour adds a dreamlike quality to the works.

Hilary Mantel, Jonathan Franzen, Mohsin Hamid, Ruth Rendell, Tom Stoppard, Malcolm Gladwell, Eleanor Catton and many more recommend the books that impressed them this year

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw (Fourth Estate) is a brilliant, sprawling, layered and unsentimental portrayal of contemporary China. It made me think and laugh. I also love Dave Eggers' The Circle (Hamish Hamilton), which is a sharp-eyed and funny satire about the obsession with "sharing" our lives through technology. It's convincing and a little creepy.

William Boyd

By strange coincidence two of the most intriguing art books I read this year had the word "Breakfast" in their titles. They were Breakfast with Lucian by Geordie Greig (Jonathan Cape) and Breakfast at Sotheby's by Philip Hook (Particular). Greig's fascinating, intimate biography of Lucian Freud was a revelation. Every question I had about Freud – from the aesthetic to the intrusively gossipy – was answered with great candour and judiciousness. Hook's view of the art world is that of the professional auctioneer. In an A-Z format, it is an entire art education contained in under 350 pages. Wry, dry and completely beguiling.

Bill Bryson

The Compatibility Gene by Daniel M Davis (Allen Lane) is an elegantly written, unexpectedly gripping account of how scientists painstakingly unravelled the way in which a small group of genes (known as MHC genes) crucially influence, and unexpectedly interconnect, various aspects of our lives, from how well we fight off infection to how skilfully we find a mate. Lab work has rarely been made to seem more interesting or heroic. But my absolute book of the year is Philip Davies's hefty, gorgeous London: Hidden Interiors (English Heritage/Atlantic Publishing), which explores 180 fabulous London interior spaces that most people know nothing about, from George Gilbert Scott's wondrous chapel at King's College to L Manze's eel, pie and mash shop in Walthamstow. It is beautifully illustrated with photographs by Derek Randall and worth every penny of its £40 price.

Eleanor Catton

My discovery of the year was Eimear McBride's debut novel A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (Galley Beggar Press): in style, very similar to Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, but the broken ellipses never feel like a gimmick or a game. I was utterly devastated by Colin McAdam's A Beautiful Truth (Granta), and utterly delighted by Elizabeth Knox's sly and ingenious Mortal Fire (Farrar Straus Giroux). My favourite novel for children published this year was the marvellously funny and inventive Heap House (Hot Key), written and illustrated by Edward Carey.

Shami Chakrabarti

Helping to judge this year's Samuel Johnson prize meant getting stuck into some serious non-fiction. The six books that made the shortlist – Empires of the Dead (David Crane, William Collins), Return of a King (William Dalrymple, Bloomsbury), A Sting in the Tale (Dave Goulson, Jonathan Cape), Under Another Sky (Charlotte Higgins, Jonathan Cape), The Pike (Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Fourth Estate)and Margaret Thatcher (Charles Moore, Allen Lane)– are among my favourites from 2013. Dalrymple's masterful retelling of the first Afghan war had an eerie modern-day relevance, while Hughes-Hallett's portrayal of the fascist poet Gabriele D'Annunzio was a sombre reminder of the perils of political extremism. On a completely contrary note, Goulson's case for the importance of bumblebees will live long in my memory for its sheer passion and scientific detail.

Sarah Churchwell

Janet Malcolm's Forty-One False Starts (Granta) provides a masterclass on the art of the essay from one of its most formidable living practitioners – often, as with the title essay, by sharing object lessons in failure. These occasional pieces offer glimpses into the creative process, the writer's constant search for structure, order and consonance. Even when individual essays did not live up to Malcolm's rigorous standards, the collection as a whole shows how connections emerge from the workings of one memorably searching, restless, ruthless mind.

Jim Crace

The four non-fiction books I most valued this year have an unusual strength and depth in common; the single themes they profess to focus on are also the Trojan horses through which their writers smuggle in a whole wide world of instruction, knowledge and contemporary significance. They are: Spillover, David Quammen's investigation of animal-to-human viruses (Vintage); Falling Upwards (Harper Collins), Richard Holmes's history of ballooning; The Searchers (Bloomsbury), Glenn Frankel's account of the 1836 abduction by Comanches of Cynthia Ann Parker and its unending aftermath; and Mark Cocker's loving and magisterial Birds and People(Jonathan Cape).

Roddy Doyle

George Saunders's collection of stories, Tenth of December (Bloomsbury), is spectacularly good. The stories are clever and moving, and the title story is the best piece of fiction I've read this year. The Searchers, by Glenn Frankel, is about the stories behind the story that became the classic John Ford film. It's a history of America, an exploration of racial intolerance, an account of how, and why, real events can become legends. It's also hugely entertaining – as well as huge. My favourite book this year is Paul Morley's The North (And Almost Everything in It) (Bloomsbury). History told backwards, a memoir, a love letter to Liverpool, several to Manchester; the book pushed me to go to the Lowry exhibition at the Tate and made me listen again to George Formby and the Buzzcocks. The book filled my head. It was much too long and occasionally irritating, but when I got to the end I wished there'd been more of it.

Richard Ford

James Salter's novel All That Is (Picador). Not in my (admittedly failing) memory have I read a novel that, at its crucialest moment, made me just stand straight up out of my chair and have to walk around the room for several minutes. Laid into the customary Salterish verbal exquisiteness and vivid intelligence is such remarkable audacity and dark-hued verve about us poor humans. It's a great novel.

Jonathan Franzen

My vote is for Eric Schlosser's Command and Control (Allen Lane). Do you really want to read about the thermonuclear warheads that are still aimed at the city where you live? Do you really need to know about the appalling security issues that have dogged nuclear weapons in the 70 years since their invention? Yes, you do. Schlosser's book reads like a thriller, but it's masterfully even-handed, well researched, and well organised. Either he's a natural genius at integrating massive amounts of complex information, or he worked like a dog to write this book. You wouldn't think the prospect of nuclear apocalypse would make for a reading treat, but in Schlosser's hands it does.

Antonia Fraser

The Poets' Daughters by Katie Waldegrave (Hutchinson) is an engrossing study of Dora Wordsworth and Sara Coleridge. A double biography is an intricate pattern to achieve, but Waldegrave brings it off triumphantly: she also brings compassion as well as scholarship to her aid, so that at times the story is almost unbearably moving. After reading this book, I went right back to the paternal poetry and read it with fresh eyes.Olivier by Philip Ziegler (MacLehose Press), published appropriately enough as the National Theatre celebrates its 50th anniversary, is another narrative that sweeps you along. While in no sense a hagiography – there is plenty of discreet criticism when necessary – it enriched my sense of this amazing multi-faceted, multi-talented man. When I watch Henry V, for the umpteenth time, I shall gaze into those brilliant enigmatic eyes with even more awe, and a certain amount of apprehension.

Stephen Frears

Best read of the year was Into the Silence (Vintage), Wade Davis's account of the three unsuccessful Everest expeditions, through the back door of Tibet, culminating in the death of George Mallory in 1924. Men from the first world war showing endurance and a capacity for suffering beyond my comprehension. Maybe the prime minister should read it before he makes an idiot of himself. Oh and Love, Nina by Nina Stibbe (Viking). But I would say that since it's about my ex‑wife and our children. Letters from their Leicester nanny. Very funny and sharp.

Malcolm Gladwell

I read so many books this year that I loved – Jeremy Adelman's biography of Albert O Hirschman, Worldly Philosopher(Princeton University Press), David Epstein's The Sports Gene (Yellow Jersey), and Jonathan Dee's magnificent A Thousand Pardons (Corsair) – but my favourite was a novel I picked up entirely randomly, in an airport bookstore: The Paris Architect by Charles Belfoure (Sourcebooks Landmark). It is a beautiful and elegant account of an ordinary man's unexpected and reluctant descent into heroism during the second world war. I have no idea who Belfoure is, but he needs to write another book, now!

John Gray

Adam Phillips' One Way and Another: New and Selected Essays(Hamish Hamilton). Writing of Ford Madox Ford's hero Tietjens in Parade's End, who in the middle of a conversation suddenly wondered if he was in fact the father of his child but "proved his reputation for sanity" by going on talking without any sign of distress, Phillips comments: "As though sanity for this Englishman was about being apparently undisturbed by one's most disturbing thoughts." Witty and somehow liberating, it's a comment that could only come from Phillips. Covering a wide variety of topics – "On Being Bored", "First Hates", "On Success" and "The Uses of Forgetting" are just a few – these short pieces from the psychotherapist and critic will confirm him as the best living essayist writing in English.

Mark Haddon

The Great War edited by Mark Holborn, text by Hilary Roberts (Jonathan Cape). A collection of photographs from the vast holdings of the Imperial War Museums. I have never seen or read anything that brings the first world war quite so vividly alive. Some of the events of 1914-1918 have been told and retold so many times that the whole conflict has, for many people, acquired an obscuring antique patina. This book strips it all away. It will make me seem a fool, perhaps, but I kept turning pages and thinking, my God, these are real people. These things actually happened.

Mohsin Hamid

Those unfamiliar with the American short-form master George Saunders should go out immediately and pick up a copy of his latest story collection, Tenth of December. Wow. Sharp and fun. Also, we should all be grateful for the New York Review Books Classics series, which this year has brought us Frances Pritchett's English translation of Intizar Husain's famous Urdu novel, Basti. Husain was nominated for the 2013 Man Booker International prize, and this, his best‑known work, deserves a UK publisher.

Robert Harris

In 1983, the 50-year lease on a safe deposit box on the island of Mallorca expired. It was opened and found to contain tens of thousands of pages of the diary of a minor German aristocrat, Count Harry Kessler (1868-1937), covering the years from 1880 to 1918. These have now been meticulously translated and edited by Laird M Easton, and the result is Journey to the Abyss (Vintage), a 900-page marvel. Kessler, an aesthete and amateur diplomat, travelled relentlessly between Paris, Berlin and London before the first world war and the list of his friends and acquaintances, each vividly described, is staggering: Bonnard, Cocteau, Nijinsky, Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Ravel, Rodin, Renoir, Gide, Monet, Mahler, Matissee, William Morris, Richard Strauss, Strindberg, Rilke, Verlaine, George Bernard Shaw, Hofmannsthal, Gordon Craig, Munch, Sarah Bernhardt, Max Reinhardt, George Grosz, Nietzsche (whose death mask he helps make), Walter Rathenau, Gustav Stresemann, HG Wells, Augustus John … And then comes August 1914 and Kessler – hitherto the most cultured companion – joins the Kaiser's army and briefly becomes a swaggering German nationalist. An important, underappreciated, unforgettable book.

Max Hastings

Thomas Harding's Hanns and Rudolf (William Heinemann) tells the story of how a young German Jewish refugee serving in the British army – the author's uncle – was responsible in 1945 for tracking down and arresting Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz and one of the most dreadful mass murderers of all time. Harding sketches the parallel lives of the SS officer with notable skill. The book is a moving reminder of what an extraordinary amount Britain gained by the Jewish flight from Europe in the 1930s – it could have been still more had we offered a warmer welcome to a host of German scientists who moved on to the US.

Philip Hensher

Volume one of Charles Moore's Margaret Thatcher(Allen Lane) is an extraordinary reconstruction of a political way of life now completely vanished, written with a clear eye and full of incidental pleasures. (Not least about the surprising number of adoring gay men surrounding her at all stages.) The novel I enjoyed most was Richard House's sensational pile-driver, The Kills(Picador). Catching-up reading brought me Tapan Raychaudhuri's superb memoir, The World in Our Time(HarperCollins India), not yet published in the UK, but full of the tumultuous life of the Bengal delta – a masterpiece.

Simon Hoggart

An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris (Hutchinson). Hard to imagine a thriller where you know the ending before you pick up the book, but Harris's retelling of the Dreyfus case is as taut and exciting as anything by Forsyth or Follett. The tale is told through the eyes of Col Picquart, the head of "the statistical section" within the French secret service, who witnessed Dreyfus's degradation but gradually came to realise that another officer was the traitor. The story of how he went over the heads of his superiors, none of whom wanted to rock the ship of state, is gripping, the evocation of turn-of-the-century France appealing, and the ending is magnificently downbeat, a terrific anticlimax – if that's possible.

AM Homes

Woody Guthrie's Wardy Forty: Greystone Park State Hospital Revisited by Phillip Buehler (Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc) is a hauntingly beautiful book about the five years the American folk legend, songwriter and activist spent as a patient at the Greystone Park State Hospital in New Jersey. Guthrie, who had Huntington's disease, lived among the mental patients on ward 40. It was here that he was introduced to the 19-year-old Bob Dylan. Photographer Phillip Buehler, who has made a career of exploring 20th-century ruins, first climbed into Greystone through a window. The beauty of the decaying building, thick curls of paint peeling off the walls, light seeping into long empty narrow patient rooms like cells, spurred his curiosity. He located Guthrie's files and, working with archivists and the Guthrie family, was able to put together a portrait of a man, a place and a point in American history when large state hospitals were all too often warehouses for humanity. There are notes from doctors indicating they had no idea who Guthrie was; or they saw him as a wanderer a vagrant, and thought his claims about songwriting were delusions of grandeur. A particular quote from Woody's son Arlo stayed with me – a patient tells Woody that he loved his book Bound for Glory. "You read my book?" Woody asks. "No, I ate your book," the patient says.

Barbara Kingsolver

I love surprise finds, so I'll recommend two debut novels that swept me away.The Golem and the Djinni by Helene Wecker (Blue Door), has the detailed realism of historical fiction, the haunting feel of a folk tale, and is one of only two novels I've ever loved whose main characters are not human. (The other was The White Bone by Barbara Gowdy.) And Susan Nussbaum's Good Kings, Bad Kings (out in March 2014 from Oneworld Publications) is a ferociously honest, funny, completely unstoppable trip through an institutionally corrupt home for disabled teenagers. I had no intention of going where they took me. That's the thrill of fiction.

David Kynaston

Kenneth Roy's The Invisible Spirit: A Life of Postwar Scotland 1945-75 (ICS) is by someone who lived through the period but is admirably unsentimental. Well-informed, highly readable, slightly prickly, often opinionated – not least about the seriously flawed Scottish establishment – this feels like something that needed to be written. Ian Nairn: Words in Place (Five Leaves) by Gillian Darley and David McKie– I am far from alone in having the awkward, melancholic architectural writer and broadcaster as one of my heroes: partly for his deep conviction that the built environment mattered, partly for his insistence – in defiance of modernist orthodoxy – that people mattered more. One day no doubt Nairn will get a heavy-duty biography, but for the time being this elegant, rather slighter treatment does the job with charm and just the right degree of critical affection.

John Lanchester

Nina Stibbe's Love, Nina, a collection of letters to her sister from the period in the mid-80s when she was working as a nanny, is funny and sharp and has a distinctive streak of wildness: no book this year made me laugh more. Also funny and sharp, though in a darker vein, is ASA Harrison's he-said, she-said psychological thriller, The Silent Wife(Headline). Finally, the last entry in the funny-sharp stakes are the novels of Penelope Fitzgerald, which I've been reading thanks to Hermione Lee's biography, Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life (Chatto & Windus). The odd thing is that Lee's book has had more influence on my reading than anything else this year, even though I'm not going to read the biography itself until I've finished the novels. That's because I don't want prematurely to spoil the mystery of how Fitzgerald could have known so much about so many worlds, from pre-revolutionary Moscow to 60s theatre-school London to German Romanticism. (I think I can guess how she knew so much about houseboats and bookshops.) Last recommendation: Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False(OUP USA), an extraordinary and very controversial intervention in the current ructions about science and religion, from one of the world's most respected philosophers.

Mark Lawson

On either side of the Atlantic, two octogenarian grand masters of espionage fiction were on high form: John le Carré's A Delicate Truth(Viking) and Charles McCarry's The Shanghai Factor(Head of Zeus) dramatise the cumulative consequences of decades of spying and lying by the victors of the second world war. Drawing on a lifetime of learning, and defying several life-threatening conditions, Clive James translated Dante: The Divine Comedy(Picador) into punchy, theologically serious and frequently funny verse. Julian Barnes reformed the conventional autobiography in Levels of Life (Jonathan Cape), combining essay, fiction and memoir in reflecting on the death of love, while Hermione Lee rethought the conventions of biography in a compelling account of the life and work (and overlaps between) of the until now underrated writer Penelope Fitzgerald. And, as readers migrate to the ebook, two lavishly produced volumes made the case for the physical book: a new edition (including the Olympic Flame bowl) of Thomas Heatherwick's thrilling design compendium Making (Thames & Hudson) and JJ Abrams and Doug Dorst's S. (Canongate): an astonishing interactive project that encloses secret books and secret readers within what seems to be a 1949 library book.

Penelope Lively

Hermione Lee's Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life is literary biography at its best – a masterly discussion of the work of that fine novelist and an illuminating account of the life of a complex and elusive person. I thought I knew both the work and the writer pretty well but have learned much – new insights into the novels, aspects of her life of which I knew nothing. Nobody does elderly men better than Jane Gardam. Last Friends(Little, Brown) is the concluding volume in her trilogy about the legal pack – Feathers, Veneering, Fiscal-Smith – that began with Old Filth. Throughout the series Jane Gardam has switched viewpoints with extraordinary dexterity. Elegant, funny, unexpected – Last Friends ties things up. I am a long-time fan of Adam Thorpe. His versatility is remarkable – historical novels, shrewd forays into contemporary life. And now a thriller, Flight (Vintage). It zips from the Middle East to the Outer Hebrides – brilliant plotting, a mesmerising read.

Robert Macfarlane

Never a man to take a straight line where a diversion was possible, Patrick Leigh Fermor spent almost 50 years not-quite-finishing the final book of his trilogy describing his walk across Europe in the 1930s. It appeared this autumn as The Broken Road(John Murray), two years after his death, brought to publication by Artemis Cooper and Colin Thubron. I opened it expecting disappointment – how could it be as good as its sibling volumes? – and ended it amazed. I read Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries (Granta) three times in my capacity as Man Booker judge, and each time round it yielded new riches. It is a vastly complex novel about investment and return, gift and theft, value and worth, which – in performance of its own ethics – gives far more than it appears to possess. Finally, in minimalist contrast to Catton's maximalist novel, I loved Wolfhou by Autumn Richardson and Richard Skelton, another exquisitely produced pamphlet of place-poetry from Corbel Stone Press, who work out of a cottage in the western Lake District.

Hilary Mantel

Indulge in a big and richly satisfying literary biography, from an artist in the form: Hermione Lee's Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life. It will send you back to the subject's own piquant and elusive novels. But perhaps a book of the year should be a mirror of the times? If so, feed righteous indignation on Damian McBride's Power Trip: A Decade of Policy, Plots and Spin (Backbite). Bankrupt of morals and bankrupt of style, it is a nonpareil of peevishness, and self-delusion shines from it like a Christmas star.

Pankaj Mishra

The most remarkable discovery for me this year was Kirill Medvedev's It's No Good(Ugly Duckling Presse), a collection of poems and essays, a brilliant artistic and political response to the depredations of the Yeltsin and Putin era. Italo Calvino's Letters: 1941-1985 (Princeton Press) and Collection of Sand: Essays (Penguin Modern Classics) remind us of a type of writerly mind almost extinct in Anglo-America: worldly, invariably curious, quietly passionate and elegant. Julia Lovell's translations of Zhu Wen's stories in The Matchmaker, the Apprentice and the Football Fan (Columbia) yet again affirm him as one of the most interesting Chinese writers today. This was a particularly rich and exciting year in literary translations from Indian languages; the stories in Ajay Navaria's Unclaimed Terrain(Navayana Publications), and the novels by Sachin Kundalkar (Cobalt Blue, Hamish Hamilton) and Shamsur Rahman Faruqi (The Mirror of Beauty, Hamish Hamilton) hint at the yet unrevealed depth and diversity of Indian literatures.

Blake Morrison

Adelle Waldman's first novel The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P (William Heinemann) is memorable for its Austen-like wit, humour, social astuteness and scarily accurate insights into men. Rather than condemn the protagonist (a young New Yorker) as misogynistic and self-obsessed, Waldman sends him up, to devastating effect. Lucy Hughes-Hallett adopts a similar strategy in her terrific biography of the poet, seducer and fascist Gabriele D'Annunzio, The Pike. The pace is hectic, as befits D'Annunzio's life, and I enjoyed the quote from the ex-lover who said his ideal would be an octopus with a hundred women's legs – but no head. Helen Mort's Division Street (Chatto & Windus) is an excellent first poetry collection – lucid, intelligent, politically aware, and loyal to the northern landscapes that inspired it. Dave Eggers's The Circle, about the abolition of privacy in the age of social media, is a must-read dystopian novel – the future it envisages has all but arrived.

Andrew Motion

Tim Dee's Four Fields(Jonathan Cape) belongs in the tradition of "nature writing", but works with it too – putting its beautifully written sentences in the service of description and evocation, but using them to frame a serious conversation about environmental preservation and its opposites; it's a deeply attractive book and also an important one. Inside the Rainbow (Redstone Press), edited by Julian Rothenstein and Olga Budashevskaya, is a survey of Russian children's literature from 1920-35, and the subtitle tells us what to expect: "Beautiful books, terrible times". Indeed. But brilliantly clever, seditious, amusing, brave and delightful books as well; their illustrations and jackets are all reproduced here to wonderful effect. JO Morgan's long poem At Maldon (CB Editions) is a riff on the Old English poem, and owes something to Christopher Logue's War Music and Alice Oswald's Memorial– but it is its own thing too: inventive, striking and memorable. And a reminder that Morgan is one of the most original poets around.

Edna O'Brien

La Folie Baudelaire by Roberto Galasso (Allen Lane) is a brilliant kaleidoscopic rendering of the tormented poet, his times and the city of Paris that "breathes" in his prose and poetry. We meet Baudelaire the dandy, his indecorous mistress Jeanne, both muse and vampire, his mother Caroline and his hated stepfather General Aupick, who, in the bloodshed of 1848, Baudelaire asked one of the insurgents to shoot. It is one of the most satisfying biographies I have ever read. Sylvia Plath: Drawings (Faber), lovingly compiled by her daughter Frieda Hughes, shows Plath's observation of everyday things – a thistle, a horse chestnut, the willows near Grantchester. It is also salutary to compare the austerity of her poetry with the rapture in her letters to her husband (included here), in which she envisages his presence "come day, come night, come hurricane and holocaust …" Dear Boy by Emily Berry (Faber): from the evidence here, this poet's imagination is rich, playful and restless, with the occasional note of anguish, which Plath would surely approve of, like a glimpse of the first crocus. Last, but by no means least, Donal Ryan's The Spinning Heart (Doubleday Ireland) is funny, moving and beautifully written.

Susie Orbach

Alan Rusbridger's Play It Again: An Amateur Against the Impossible is a wonderful account of trying to learn a complex piano piece while running the Guardian at the time of WikiLeaks and phone hacking. I had to skip some of the accounts of the fingering he is learning but he eloquently expresses the struggle to take up the playing of this piece – the Chopin Ballade No 1 – and segues into fascinating accounts of different historic pianos and the idiosyncratic manner individual musicians use them, and his various "teachers", who mostly sound very strict, alongside the emergencies from the office. A parallel story of how newspapers can move forward in the digital age runs along the narrative. I am always curious about people's daily lives and their curiosities. This book gives both in abundance.

Ian Rankin

Kate Atkinson's Life After Life(Doubleday) is her most challenging, complex and compelling novel yet. A woman has the chance to live life over and over again in often surprising ways. No Booker listing: no justice. Louise Doughty's Apple Tree Yard (Faber) is ostensibly a courtroom drama that asks how its sensible, intelligent middle-class heroine ended up in the dock in a murder case – beguilingly written, steely and plausible and occasionally shocking. Niccolò Ammaniti was a new name to me. Let the Games Begin(Canongate) is a wild ride with the fevered quality of Pynchon and Vonnegut as a party to end all parties sees the various characters vying to survive a grotesque uprising. It's a satire on contemporary culture, Italian politics and the writing profession itself. Funny, sharp, and really quite rude. In a similar vein, John Niven's Straight White Male (William Heinemann) is the story of a hugely successful Irish screenwriter and his gloriously incorrect behaviour. There are laughs aplenty, but Niven adds growing poignancy as his hero becomes self-aware. It is Niven's best book, and the protagonist is easily the match of John Self in Martin Amis's Money.

Ruth Rendell

My choice isn't a new book, but it was reissued this year. I'm ashamed that I had never heard of Stonerby John Williams (Vintage) until I found it in a bookshop three months ago. I was stunned by it, it's so good. And yet very little happens in it except joy and pain and sorrow in the American midwest, love and passion and the mistakes everyone makes. It's beautifully written in simple but brilliant prose, a novel of an ordinary life, an examination of a quiet tragedy, the work of a great but little-known writer.

Lionel Shriver

Three novels stand out for me in 2013: Visitation Street by Ivy Pochoda (Sceptre), set in Red Hook, Brooklyn; two girls venture out on a pink inflatable raft into the filthy East River and only one comes back. Great writing, great setting, beautifully rendered characters. The Son by Phillipp Meyer (Simon & Schuster): an epic set in Texas that uses, among other things, that white-man-raised-by-Indians routine, and yet incredibly it doesn't feel tired. Totally engrossing. Lastly, Claire Messud's The Woman Upstairs (Virago), which teems with fury, and tells a tale of breathtaking betrayal. It's a great study as well in the (possibly?) unreliable narrator. You keep puzzling over whether this woman is completely off her head.

Helen Simpson

Hermione Lee's fascinating biography of Penelope Fitzgerald charts a life that travelled the full 360 degrees on the wheel of fortune – from early promise and privilege down to dramatic middle-aged doldrums then back up to a late-blooming two decades of literary productivity and success. I'm now reading Fitzgerald's last four novels, which are every bit as breathtaking as Lee's concluding chapters describe. I read Nikolai Leskov's The Enchanted Wanderer for the first time this year in a vigorous new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Admired by Chekhov, Gorky and Tolstoy, these stories seethe with picaresque unpredictability, outlandish but touching monologues and recklessly impulsive characters like the country girl turned femme fatale in Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.

Tom Stoppard

This is the time of year when I try in vain to remember what I was reading up to 12 months ago, and end up choosing three books I've enjoyed in the last 12 weeks. In the present case, these are Nature's Oracle by Ullica Segerstrale (OUP), a biography of WD (Bill) Hamilton, the evolutionary biologist whose insight into the operation of kin selection at gene level suggested how altruism might have emerged from natural selection; a hugely enjoyable novel, Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon (Jonathan Cape), who, when he's in his hardboiled vein, writes the most entertaining dialogue in any year; and The New York Times Book of Mathematics, which is what it sounds like: a century of news from maths written up for a general readership, and nobody does it better.

Colm Tóibín

Titian: His Life by Sheila Hale (HarperPress) manages an intimate and careful study of Titian's body of work, plus an intricate knowledge of politics and art in 16th-century Venice and in the Europe from which Titian received his commissions. She captures Titian's vast ambition and does justice to his achievement, but also creates a portrait of an age. Reiner Stach's Kafka: The Decisive Years and Kafka: The Years of Insight (Princeton University Press) are the second and third volumes of a three-volume biography. Stach reads the work and the life with minute care and sympathy. He has a deep understanding of the world that Kafka came from and the personalities who touched his life, and this is matched by an intelligence and tact about the impulse behind the work itself.

Helen Mort's debut collection is a finely wrought disappearing act

Helen Mort keeps giving herself the slip. The beauty of her debut collection, Division Street, is partly the sense that it has been written against the clock. Every poem is on the move. Her parents might appear as fixed points: a father sifting flour in the kitchen, a mother standing at a window, but Helen Mort herself – like time – does not settle. The Complete Works of Anonymous is especially revealing. Beyond the sympathetic curiosity of the first verse is the defining and less usual wish in the second to cast off into a nameless freedom and leave self behind.

There are several poems in which this happens. This is at its most physical in Thinspiration Shots, in which Mort describes the alarming way dancers starve themselves, their vanishing acts. When she says "you", she seems to remember herself: "The miles you ran from home, near fainting/ Trying to give yourself the slip." There are other less obscure ways in which self can be subsumed – such as becoming the stuff of which other people's dreams are made (explored in the excellent Other People's Dreams). And, in The Girl Next Door, she welcomes in an alter ego, a casual imposter who steals up on her in every sense. It's a terrific poem, written with a downbeat power that protects it from contrivance: "First she came to borrow sugar. Sunday afternoons/ she'd cadge a pint of milk."

Little by little, the girl from next door moves in on the narrative until: "I find excuses/ not to leave the house; the evening rain,/ the biting wind. Last night she said my name./ It suited her." It is a more theatrical way of sidestepping self. Throughout, this poetry has sharp peripheral vision – with sightings of deer and foxes. It is the elusiveness of the animals that seems to appeal, and their glamorous anonymity.

Ambitious but least convincing is the long poem about the 1984 Sheffield riots (Mort was born in Sheffield in 1985). The poem feels willed and riskily inauthentic. She attempts, not altogether successfully, to get round the problem: "This is a reconstruction. Nobody/ will get hurt." But her attempt to connect South Yorkshire's picketing miners with life as a Cambridge undergraduate feels forced: "You're left to guess which picket line you crossed – a gilded College gate, a better supermarket, the entrance to your flat where, even now, someone has scrawled the worst insult they can – a name. Look close. It's yours." Anonymity, once again, might have reprieved.

The poems have an elegiac quality, though they often lack any reason to grieve beyond the melancholy passing of time. Yet the style is often satisfyingly Orwellian– no long words where a shorter one would serve. Nor is she a poetic detective assisting with mysteries. She knows when to let be and let go. In an archipelago of poems about the north, she explores Shetland: "We walk to Windhoose, find a barn even the ghosts/ have left, a sheep's spine turning on a string,/ a name reduced to nothing but its sound./ Our silences become the better part of us."

In the same way that she favours silence, she is a winter poet who prefers bare branches to opulent springs. Snow piles into more than one poem. And one of her finest, Rag & Bone, builds to an all-inclusive conceit about salvage at the dead end of the year: "The winter trees still reaching out for all the leaves they lost." These are lines eclipsed only by the collection's most effortlessly beautiful image (from Coffin Path): "Today the dark's grown courteous:/ shadows seem to step aside/ to let me pass."

The Complete Works of Anonymous

I'd like to find it: leather-bound, unlikely
in the small-town library, somewhere
between Abbs and Ashbery, pages curling
like a song: On Glasgow Rain, A Kiss for Marilyn,
The Hidden Life of Honey Bees, a hundred titles
that I'd seen in old anthologies, wondered
at the hand behind them, said that word aloud –
Anon. Anon, a kind of lullaby.

I'll raise a glass to dear Anonymous: the old
familiar anti-signature, the simple courage
of that mark. I wish that each of us
could put such trust in words we'd spend a lifetime
on the vessel of a single verse, proofing our lines,
only to unmoor them from our names.

An unsettling picture of a young woman and her infant charge reveals a writer far less 'ladylike' than we might expect

The author of this week's poem, "Cradle Song at Twilight", might have been the first woman poet laureate: she was nominated twice for the position, in 1895 and 1913. Journalist, essayist, suffragist, and mother of seven surviving children, Alice Meynell has no small claim to being considered the immediate intellectual precursor of Virginia Woolf. Woolf herself possibly might not have agreed; she considered Meynell, idealised and promoted as the archetypal Victorian "Angel in the House", as an antagonist rather than a foremother.

Today, Meynell is best known for a handful of anthology poems that perpetuate her decorous, "ladylike" image. Formally, "Cradle Song at Twilight" has the usual fluent and restrained elegance, but it's not at all a safe or comforting poem. The picture it presents is too genuinely alive and complex, qualities engrained in some of the unexpected word-choices.

Christopher Ricks (to his credit) includes the poem in The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse, giving 1895 as its date of first publication. This means it's not one of Meynell's earliest poems; these were published in the collection, Preludes, in 1875. Meynell wrote the bulk of her poetry towards the end of her long life, and, on the basis of its psychological prescience, I'd guess "Cradle Song at Twilight" to be a work of her later maturity.

Its portrayal of a nurse, or nursing mother, quietly but decisively challenges the Victorian maternal stereotype. The girl isn't intent on her charge: she's "too young" and, implicitly, too "slender". The watchful speaker tells us she holds the child "laxly" – an observation made succinct by that illuminating and unexpected adverb. So convincing is the vignette of a young, careless, impatient girl that it's difficult to remember the poet possibly has metaphorical intentions.

"Twilight" is a word that alludes to the light cast when the sun is below the horizon. Although it usually refers to dusk, it can also mean the early light of morning. It's a strange word, when you think about it, implying "doubled light" when in fact the light would be diminished. Because the child is supposed to be asleep, the poem's "Twilight" seems more likely to be that of the evening.

To pursue the metaphor: if Night is the mother, who is the child? The sun, the moon, the speaker herself? As a Catholic and sometime metaphysical poet, Meynell might be expected to portray the Virgin and Child, but the notion of a Virgin Mary who longs to run off and play seems a too-radical revision. Perhaps, rather, this is a mythological portrait, depicting Cupid and Venus.

The second stanza certainly suggests a mischievous Cupid-like infant. Meynell, for all her Victorian decorousness, can't have been oblivious to the erotic undertones. The child's playing with the nurse leads directly to the nurse's own thoughts of "other playfellows" – which may, again, have sexual connotations, or simply imply that the playfellows she longs for are other children like herself.

I like the tenuousness of the relationship portrayed, the dramatic irony inherent in the fact that the child and nurse are, perhaps like Twilight itself, facing different ways Psychologically, there's an incipient conflict between the nurse's need for freedom and the child's need for secure sleep. At the same time, and so far, no harm has been done.

Something even more mysterious occurs in the last two lines. The poem seems to mutate into a prayer: "An unmaternal fondness keep/ Her alien eyes." What is the nature of this "unmaternal fondness"? Is it God the Father's love that is being invoked, or the affection of a sexual partner, patron or employer?

The word "alien" is the final surprise. It's so beautifully devoid of sentimentality. Yet the Night (or nurse) has never seemed closer to being a real person than in this description. Motherless as well as un-motherly, this young woman now seems displaced on every level. Ruth, who "stood in tears amid the alien corn" in Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale", might be a relevant figure.

Could "Cradle Song at Twilight" be a poem that disguises its subject - a dark-skinned young nurse the Meynells once employed? Or is the poet remembering herself as a reluctant young mother? These are tempting interpretations. Yet it seems a pity to try and press a haunting and un-homely poem into some purely naturalistic mould. Bathed in their own twilight, the two stanzas are like a hinged icon, where, instead of a rapt, mutual exchange, the eye-contact between the Child and the Virgin flows only one-way. The child is happy in the loose hold of his young nurse, the nurse is restlessly dreaming of another life. How convincing and unsettling they are – whoever they may be.

Cradle Song at Twilight

The child not yet is lulled to rest.
 Too young a nurse, the slender Night
So laxly holds him to her breast
 That throbs with flight.

He plays with her, and will not sleep.
 For other playfellows she sighs;
An unmaternal fondness keep
 Her alien eyes.

Posthumous nomination for Bernardine Bishop on list that also includes Kate Atkinson, Maggie O'Farrell and Evie Wyld

For 50 years Bernardine Bishop worked as a teacher and psychotherapist before cancer forced her retirement and helped prompt a late-life decision to return to writing. On Tuesday night, one of three novels that she wrote with a blaze of energy before her death in July was shortlisted for one of the UK's leading literary awards.

Bishop was posthumously nominated in the novel category of the 2013 Costa awards for Unexpected Lessons in Love – part of an all-female shortlist that also includes Kate Atkinson, Maggie O'Farrell and Evie Wyld. "It is wonderful and also very sad because Bernadine's not here to enjoy it," said her editor, Kate Parkin. "I wish she had been."

Bishop wrote two novels when she was in her early 20s and before that found a degree of fame as the youngest witness in the Lady Chatterley trial in 1960, giving testimony along the lines of yes she had read DH Lawrence's book and no she was not corrupted by it.

Cancer forced her retirement from her successful career as a psychotherapist but it was being given the all-clear by her oncologist that really spurred her to take up writing again. "She completed three novels in the most extraordinarily short order," said Parkin. "There was an energy there that she tapped into … out it poured."

Unexpected Lessons in Love centres on two women who become friends, both diagnosed with cancer, but it is a book that readers will feel better for reading, said Parkin. "It is a novel of someone who is completely on top of their game; I think it is an extraordinary achievement."

Bishop's next two novels will be published in 2014 and 2015 and the judges for the Costa prize praised Unexpected Lessons in Love as "an unflinching, darkly funny story of love, obsession and illness that is unexpected in every way".

Although it is obviously unusual, Bishop is not the first to be posthumously nominated for the Costa awards, joining excellent company including Ted Hughes, who won book of the year for Birthday Letters in 1998 and Simon Gray, shortlisted in 2009 for his post-Smoking Diaries memoir, Coda.

The Costa book awards reward enjoyability by writers based in the UK and Ireland. There are five categories – novel, first novel, biography, poetry and children's book – and winners of each section will be announced in January. Each of those then vies for the overall £30,000 book of the year prize.

Up against Bishop's novel are Life After Life by Atkinson, who won the overall prize back in 1995 with Behind the Scenes at the Museum, when the prize was called the Whitbread; Instructions for a Heatwave, by O'Farrell; and All the Birds, Singing, by Wyld.

In poetry, Clive James is shortlisted for his translation of Dante's The Divine Comedy, a consuming project on which he worked for decades. He is joined on the shortlist by Helen Mort, Robin Robertson and Michael Symmons Roberts.

The biography section is diverse, taking in penguins, Auschwitz, alcoholic writers and one of the most repellent poets in history. Gavin Francis, a GP, followed penguins for more than a year as a research station doctor on the Caird Coast of Antarctica and is shortlisted for the resulting book. The others are Thomas Harding's double biography of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, and Hanns Alexander, the German Jew who tracked him down; Olivia Laing's examination of why great writers such as Fitzgerald and Hemingway were also such prodigious drinkers; and Lucy Hughes-Hallett's biography of the poet turned unhinged fascist leader Gabriele D'Annunzio, a book that last month won the Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction.

The children's section includes two debut writers in the form of former pig farmer and now teacher Ross Montgomery, for Alex, the Dog and the Unopenable Door, and Sarah Naughton for The Hanged Man Rises. The list is completed by Rose Under Fire by Elizabeth Wein, and Goth Girl: and the Ghost of a Mouse by Chris Riddell.

The first novel award will be contested by Sam Byers for Idiopathy, Kate Clanchy for Meeting the English, The Shock of the Fall by Nathan Filer, a registered mental health nurse, and Sathnam Sanghera for Marriage Material.

The shortlists

Novel award

Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

Bernardine Bishop, Unexpected Lessons in Love

Maggie O'Farrell, Instructions for a Heatwave

Evie Wyld, All the Birds, Singing

First novel award

Sam Byers, Idiopathy

Kate Clanchy, Meeting the English

Nathan Filer, The Shock of the Fall

Sathnam Sanghera, Marriage Material

Biography award

Gavin Francis, Empire Antarctica: Ice, Silence & Emperor Penguins

Thomas Harding, Hanns and Rudolf: The German Jew and the Hunt for the Kommandant of Auschwitz

Lucy Hughes-Hallett, The Pike: Gabriele D'Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War

Olivia Laing, The Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink

Poetry award

Clive James, Dante, The Divine Comedy

Helen Mort, Division Street

Robin Robertson, Hill of Doors

Michael Symmons Roberts, Drysalter

Children's book award

Ross Montgomery, Alex, the Dog and the Unopenable Door

Sarah Naughton, The Hanged Man Rises

Chris Riddell, Goth Girl and the Ghost of a Mouse

Elizabeth Wein, Rose Under Fire

In this entralling, expertly researched portrait, the modernist poet is revealed as more active than Eliot and more pugnacious than Pound

Basil Bunting's Collected Poems opens with "Villon", drafted when he was 25 and then handed over, like The Waste Land four years before it, to Ezra Pound for dramatic cuts and improvements. We know relatively little about the 15th-century French poet François Villon, beyond the fact that he was involved in a murderous brawl, was banished from Paris and spent time in jail. He was clearly a hell-raiser and a vagabond, which made him popular with modernist types who sought models of poetic virility and were keen to distance themselves from the effeteness and dandyism of the fin‑de-siècle. Pound, although he was tone-deaf, wrote an opera based on "Le Testament de Villon"; in his book of essays The Sacred Wood TS Eliot compared the same work favourably to Tennyson's In Memoriam.

"Blacked by the sun, washed by the rain," Bunting writes of Villon, "hither and thither scurrying as the wind varies." Bunting emerges from Richard Burton's thoroughly researched and enthralling biography as living a life far more active and variegated than the bookish Eliot's, and even than the pugnacious, controversial Pound's. Like Villon, Bunting had several spells behind bars. Born in 1900 into a prosperous middle-class family in Northumbria, where his father was a celebrated doctor, he was just old enough to be conscripted for the first world war. On receiving his call-up papers he registered as a conscientious objector, refusing even to take up agricultural work because that would send another man to the front. His pacifism probably derived from the Quaker secondary school to which he had been sent. "They took away the prison clothes / and on the frosty nights I froze," he recalls in "Villon", and indeed it seems he was confined for weeks in a freezing darkened cell on starvation rations. Prisoners were allowed to send and receive one letter a month.

On his release, Bunting enrolled in the London School of Economics, but absconded mid-course, setting off on a trip to Denmark, Norway and Russia, which he never reached, getting himself arrested just short of the border and deported back to Newcastle. He spent most of his 20s kicking around literary circles in London and Paris, reviewing books and music for various papers in dismissive Poundian terms. In Paris he worked for a while as Ford Madox Ford's assistant on the Transatlantic Review, but soon found himself again in trouble with the authorities, this time for drunkenly assaulting a posse of gendarmes sent to arrest him for disturbing the peace. Pound was delighted to find his protege reading Villon while awaiting trial in the grande salle of the Paris courthouse; and Bunting later reflected that Villon himself might have sat awaiting sentence in the very same court. He returned shortly after his two-week sentence in a Paris prison to London, where, again à la Villon, he was occasionally so destitute he slept rough on the Embankment.

The varying winds blew Bunting hither and thither. He spent about five years with Pound in Rapallo in northern Italy, where he also got to know Yeats, who classified him as "one of Ezra's more savage disciples". In 1930, he married an American, Marian Culver. Although not as handsomely provided for as Pound's wife Dorothy Shakespear, whose annuity kept ol' Ez in typewriter ribbon and paper, remittances from her Wisconsin parents allowed Bunting to devote himself to his poetry, and to learning classical Persian. To cut down on expenses, they moved to the Canary Islands in 1933; life did prove cheaper, but Bunting disliked the landscape and people. There, he once played an "indifferent" game of chess with Franco. Even the arrival of two daughters (both given Persian names, Bourtai and Roudaba), failed to stimulate in him any desire to assume the role of breadwinner. Like Pound, he conceived of the poet as a hero whose only responsibility was to his art.

In 1936, the outbreak of the Spanish civil war drove the Buntings back to London, where Marian finally threw in the towel – despite being five months pregnant with a son Bunting would never meet (he died of polio at the age of 16). In a bitter postmortem account of their marriage, she wrote: "The idea of working for a living was so hateful to him that he screamed and raved if it was ever mentioned." Should Marian venture an opinion, she found herself "told to shut up and never open my mouth". Further, she alleges that Bunting was something of a Humbert Humbert, falling in love in Tenerife with a 12-year-old girl, on whom he lavished unwanted attentions.

Burton is quick to dismiss this vision of Bunting as a paedophile, and takes in his stride the fact that Bunting's second wife, Sima, whom he met in Persia, was 14 when they married, while he was 50. They do things differently in the east … A Bunting poem of 1964 is spoken by a Persian girl on her 14th birthday expressing surprise at the fact that she is still unwed.

The wind that eventually blew Bunting to Iran, where he was undoubtedly at his happiest, was the second world war, in which, renouncing his youthful pacifism, he was desperate to play a part. Indeed, it rescued him from aimlessness and poverty: accepted into the RAF, he was assigned to Balloon Command, and stationed in Hull and then Scotland, but on the strength of his Persian managed to get himself posted in 1942 to Iran, where an abortive barrage balloon mission was planned. He both had an excellent war and wrote some excellent war poetry – part three of "The Spoils" is as good as the best combat pieces of Keith Douglas or Anthony Hecht or Randall Jarrell. Competent and decisive, Bunting rose to the rank of wing commander, running Spitfire operations in Malta and Sicily.

The Bunting of his Persian years, which ended only with his expulsion by Mosaddegh in 1953, put me in mind of a certain breed of Englishman abroad best exemplified by Wilfred Thesiger. It's a great shame, as Burton frequently laments, that Bunting never wrote a prose book about his time there, first as a diplomat, then as a journalist for the Times – but fortunate that he wrote so many vivid and detailed letters to Dorothy Shakespear, Louis Zukofsky and others. Was he a spy? There's certainly a Graham Greene-ish element to his manoeuvring and politicking in the highest Iranian circles.

Of course, this biography has been written because in 1965 Bunting published "Briggflatts", considered one of the greatest poems of the century. Brigflatts (he added the extra g to his title to make it sound more archaic) is a tiny hamlet in Cumbria. For several years in his teens Bunting would spend a few weeks there each summer with the Greenbank family, falling in love with their daughter Peggy, to whom "Briggflatts" is dedicated. Her father, John, worked as a stonemason in the graveyard of the Brigflatts Quaker meeting house. Fifty years on, memories of these visits and of his adolescent passion jolted Bunting back to poetry; the opening section of "Briggflatts" brilliantly recasts Pound's epic mode to evoke these long-buried experiences. One of the delights of Burton's book is the chapter devoted to a close reading of the poem's effects and an exposition of its sources.

Almost as soon as it appeared, "Briggflatts" catapulted Bunting, who'd spent the prior decade working on the financial section of the Newcastle Evening Chronicle, to quite astonishing fame: packed readings, tours of America, posts in US and Canadian universities, chairmanship of the Poetry Society and the Northern Arts council. English poetic modernism, at long last, had found a star to steer by.

A fascinating biography of the Chilean poet that paints him as exuberant and heroic

"The apolitical writer is a myth created and given impulse by modern-day capitalism," declared the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. In this fascinating biography Adam Feinstein shows how Neruda evolved from a bestselling love poet into a world-famous political poet speaking up for the exploited and downtrodden; his poem "Let Me Explain a Few Things", for instance, written in response to the Spanish civil war, renounces flowers and metaphysics for the repeated line "Come and see the blood in the streets." Feinstein's Neruda is exuberant, gregarious, generous and humane, even heroic (notably helping 2,000 refugees escape Franco's Spain in 1939 and achieving his own daring escape from Chile over the Andes in 1949), although not without faults (infidelity and an unwavering admiration for Stalin). He died of cancer in 1973, just days after General Pinochet's military coup and, as Feinstein explains in a new afterword, persistent rumours that Neruda was poisoned on Pinochet's orders led to his body being exhumed earlier this year. This month it was confirmed that no traces of poison were found.

Sean O'Brien on a collection that offers the history of a marriage

In gothic literature, the house, or more likely the castle, is often viewed as a metaphor of the body. In her fourth collection, Sleeping Keys, Jean Sprackland takes a more ostensibly domestic but no less imaginative approach: here, houses comprise the location and the history of a marriage that is over and done, like the world in which the poet grew up. As is the way with the imagination, these premises may now be vacant, but they are by no means empty. "Home is so sad," wrote Philip Larkin, because it remembers us: "A joyous shot at how things ought to be, /Long fallen wide. You can see how it was: / Look at the pictures and the cutlery. / The music in the piano stool. That vase." Where Larkin offers an evocative snapshot, Sprackland maps every inch of the lost domain.

In this case, the house itself soon begins to offer a critique of its inhabitants: the early romantic comedy of an aquarium suddenly emptying itself on the carpet – "Ah! that's how they were / in those antediluvian days" – gives way to longer-term decay: "Tomorrow they would know the worst: / the ruined carpet, the marshy smell, /the brown seep through the bedroom ceiling." Sprackland is at her best when refusing the option of nostalgia. The pottery figures of a shepherdess and her swain on the mantelpiece are cheap knock-offs with badly painted features – "and look at the boy cross-eyed with lust / and the poor girl flushed and impatient, / the two of them trapped in this rictus of desire" – fit only to be smashed to pieces on the hearth. It's fascinating to compare this with Ciaran Carson's "Dresden", where idealism survives the accidental breaking of a figurine by the solitary Horse Boyle, perhaps because idealism is not confused with hope, serving instead as its own melancholy reward.

Sprackland can also deal very effectively with time which, in Larkin's words, "truly" is "our element" and yet impossible to access directly. "It Occurs to My Mother that She Might Be Dead" evokes a one-way labyrinth of habit, a lifetime spent in domestic drudgery. "How would I know? / I remember the glint in her voice as she said it, / the icy terror that seized me. And now / I stand with my arms full of sheets, and suppose I'm alive." The poem recreates that chill with the parched matter-of-factness of its conclusion, beyond which life seems, at least momentarily, unimaginable.

There are some less successful pieces in the book, and these seem bound up with its nature as a sequence – a form, like its vaguer cousins the series and the affiliated group – with a powerful contemporary attraction, offering something similar to a long poem, but without its longueurs. As the extended subject becomes a resource to be drawn on, supplying the next poem and the next, the particular life of the single poem can sometimes be subordinated to the larger project, which is, in turn, predicated on the idea of an outcome, of a point of completion, so that poems-in-themselves become the infantry of a campaign, or the eggs in the omelette.

Something of this kind appears to have happened with "Two Windows", which compares the distortion of light in a bedroom window's old glass during a couple's final row and, later, the different effect of a front-door pane. The first seems decisive in its exploding view, the second "more random: a mass / of membranes, trembling like frogspawn, / trying to net the day, unable to hold it." This should read as a discovery: if it doesn't, then perhaps at this stage the sequence knows too much about its own processes.

On the other hand, Sprackland is wittily alert to the process by which the world is pressed into the service of a poem. "Discovery" declares: "Now the rain / is stuck with her as if with some hopeless romantic / who keeps on making it stand for this or that / marvellous thing." Trying to see things for their own sake, the woman cuts an apple in half and her finger with it, and once more the apparatus of symbolism stands ticking over, awaiting admission to the house and the life.

If symbols and portents are unavoidable, why not deal with them as crisply as Sprackland does in "Sea Holly"? She brings a lover a bouquet of durable, unillusioned flowers that thrive on salt and whose "head of sweetness wears a steel collar, / a star of bracts sharp enough to draw blood." Naturally, having said this, she goes on into a triumph of adult mixed feelings: "I stood in the street, spiked with all my warnings. / And he opened the door, and the flowers and I went in."

The management of tone, as so often in this book, is assured and tactful. The indrawn breath of risk, the determination to act, and Sprackland's humanising sense of comedy are all present. Just as the effort to see things squarely does not deny feeling, so the life of feeling is not sought as an end in itself, but in concert with good sense and perspective. This is surely a wise aspiration. Sleeping Keys is a book distinguished by rueful but unembittered wisdom.

A remarkably gentle vision of the end of days, and what little might survive

The title of this week's poem, "The Line of Beauty" by Arthur O'Shaughnessy, will be familiar to many readers as the title of the fine novel by Alan Hollinghurst, which won the Booker prize in 2004.

Both poem and novel's title share a common ancestor. The quotation comes from William Hogarth's 1753 treatise, The Analysis of Beauty, where, in chapter seven, Hogarth unveils his aesthetic Philosopher's Stone. Beauty, essentially, is S-shaped: its recognition depends on a distinguishing line "composed of contrasting curves on a plane". It's slightly fanciful but amusing to think that O'Shaughnessy's poem, first published in 1881, is situated more or less in the middle of an imaginary S curving between Hogarth's treatise and Hollinghust's novel.

Perhaps O'Shaughnessy chose the Petrarchan sonnet as his form because he found there an equivalent "line of beauty", blending variety and symmetry. Traditionally, the sonnet contrasts the mutability of the beautiful with the permanence of the principle of beauty, something that, in a different way, his own poem sets out to do.

The poem moves lightly on its metrical feet, and the millenarian vision is almost languorous. While lines two and four, by only seeming to come to a rest, challenge expectations, the tone remains gentle, and the enjambment is hardly disruptive, as "summer fails/ To come again" and "earth with lagging footsteps seems well-nigh/ Spent in her annual circuit through the sky …" There's a forlorn, echoey sound in the "b" rhyme (fails/pales/avails/wails) with its flicker of a second syllable, which suggests the world ends with a dying fall, if not a whimper, as "decrepit man", with a despairing gesture, it seems, "lies down lost in the great grave to die". The placing of this line after the idea of love as "a quenched flame" is erotically suggestive.

The sestet picks up a brisker pace and stronger rhetoric. There's a lively variety in the syntax: two big questions form line nine and are answered with the splendid dramatic flourish of 10, reaching all the way back to the title: "A certain faultless, matchless, deathless line." This seems a stronger claim than Hogarth himself makes. Once again, the poem's line is extended, with a further rich brushstroke of description: "Curving consummate."

Hollinghurst's title contains a pun: the "line" of beauty and the lines of cocaine enjoyed, sometimes self-destructively, by the book's young "movers and shakers". This is probably a nuance too far for O'Shaughnessy's poem. But perhaps it shares with Hollinghurst's novel the reference to a lover's bodily beauty. Even Hogarth links the idea of his line to the actions of human bodies; the dancer, the artist as he draws, can exemplify it in their movements. O'Shaughnessy's sonnet doesn't at first appear to be a love poem. But Dinah Roe (who paints O'Shaughnessy as something of a "mover and shaker" himself) provides an interesting note to the poem's last line in her Penguin anthology, The Pre-Raphaelites from Rossetti to Ruskin. This takes us to a passage in Swinburne's "Laus Veneris": "And lo my love, mine own soul's heart, more dear/ Than mine own soul, more beautiful than God."

If O'Shaughnessy's sonnet is saying that love makes man and God interchangeable, the poet has found an interesting new way of refreshing an old platitude. But perhaps something more interesting is going on. Perhaps the British-born Irish poet is bringing his scientific knowledge to a view of the universe as interconnected beyond conventional linear hierarchies and natural/supernatural boundaries.

The Line of Beauty

When mountains crumble and rivers all run dry,
When every flower has fallen and summer fails
To come again, when the sun's splendour pales,
And earth with lagging footsteps seems well-nigh
Spent in her annual circuit through the sky;
When love is a quenched flame, and nought avails
To save decrepit man, who feebly wails
And lies down lost in the great grave to die;
What is eternal? What escapes decay?
A certain faultless, matchless, deathless line
Curving consummate. Death, Eternity,
Add nought to it, from it take naught away;
'Twas all God's gift and all man's mastery,
God become human, and man grown divine.

A host of celebrities, including Emma Thompson, Charlie Higson – and even Malcolm Gladwell – join an all-star Christmas story reading

After Byron lost his beloved Newfoundland Boatswain, the poet called the dog his 'firmest friend'. Geoffrey Bond introduces some of the Romantic pioneer's favourite canine companions