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Tavener's final broadcast: the cheerful serenity of a 'radical wizard'
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 composerSir John Tavener has been an...
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Krakow's story: a Unesco City of Literature built out of books
Home to two literary festivals, busy book fairs, clubs and writer after writer – this is a town where people queue for poetryTo mark Krakow's appointment as Unesco City of Literature, a set of...
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A dose of reality for literary events
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...
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War Reporter by Dan O'Brien – review
This collaboration between a haunted war photographer and a poet is a masterpiece of truthfulness and feelingThis book, which has just been awarded the Fenton Aldeburgh prize for best first collection,...
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Cosmic Disco by Grace Nichols – review
Grace Nichols's children's poetry is filled with wonder, ordinariness and a kind, auntly wisdomWhat poems are loved by children? Or, rather, what poems are loved by adults for children? The Opies'...
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Poem of the week: 'On the Eastern Front' by Georg Trakl
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 followedThis week's poem is John Greening's translation...
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Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012 by Geoffrey Hill – review
If the phrase 'greatest living poet in the English language' has any meaning, then we should use it to describe HillThe 1985 edition of Geoffrey Hill's Collected Poems was, by comparison with this, a...
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Hull residents in heaven after city of culture win
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...
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TS Eliot's widow's art collection sells for more than £7m
Valerie Eliot's collection was auctioned at her request to continue her charity's work encouraging young poetsA museum-worthy collection of British art amassed by the widow of TS Eliot has sold for...
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Peter Blake's portaits of characters from Under Milk Wood go on show in Cardiff
Visualisations flowing from 28-year study of Dylan Thomas's play are part of celebrations to mark 100 years since the writer's birthBeloved characters, scenes and dream sequences from Dylan Thomas's...
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Writers and critics on the best books of 2013
Hilary Mantel, Jonathan Franzen, Mohsin Hamid, Ruth Rendell, Tom Stoppard, Malcolm Gladwell, Eleanor Catton and many more recommend the books that impressed them this yearChimamanda Ngozi AdichieFive...
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Division Street by Helen Mort – review
Helen Mort's debut collection is a finely wrought disappearing actHelen Mort keeps giving herself the slip. The beauty of her debut collection, Division Street, is partly the sense that it has been...
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Poem of the week: Cradle Song at Twilight by Alice Meynell
An unsettling picture of a young woman and her infant charge reveals a writer far less 'ladylike' than we might expectThe author of this week's poem, "Cradle Song at Twilight", might have been the...
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Costa book awards 2013: late author on all-female fiction shortlist
Posthumous nomination for Bernardine Bishop on list that also includes Kate Atkinson, Maggie O'Farrell and Evie WyldFor 50 years Bernardine Bishop worked as a teacher and psychotherapist before cancer...
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A Strong Song Tows Us: The Life of Basil Bunting by Richard Burton – review
In this entralling, expertly researched portrait, the modernist poet is revealed as more active than Eliot and more pugnacious than PoundBasil Bunting's Collected Poems opens with "Villon", drafted...
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Pablo Neruda: A Passion for Life by Adam Feinstein – review
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...
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Sleeping Keys by Jean Sprackland – review
Sean O'Brien on a collection that offers the history of a marriageIn gothic literature, the house, or more likely the castle, is often viewed as a metaphor of the body. In her fourth collection,...
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Poem of the week: The Line of Beauty by Arthur O'Shaughnessy
A remarkably gentle vision of the end of days, and what little might surviveThe title of this week's poem, "The Line of Beauty" by Arthur O'Shaughnessy, will be familiar to many readers as the title of...
View ArticleJamie Oliver, Malcolm Gladwell, Jeremy Paxman and co read 'Twas the Night...
A host of celebrities, including Emma Thompson, Charlie Higson – and even Malcolm Gladwell – join an all-star Christmas story readingJamie OliverJeremy PaxmanClare BaldingColm TóibínCharlie HigsonMeg...
View ArticleByron and his dogs – in pictures
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
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