Guardian first book award shortlist 2015
American coasts and suburbias, sibling rivalry in Nigeria, sculpting muscular poetry, Putin as Simon Cowell, a father, a son and a crow ... Extracts and introductions from all the shortlisted...
View ArticleThe Poems of TS Eliot: The Annotated Text review – a monumental achievement
Eliot went from starchy student to Nobel laureate who could pack out baseball stadiums on an American tour. This landmark study provides the background to a groundbreaking body of workBuying an edition...
View ArticleThe latest weapon of political dissent: reading
A student in Illinois spoke volumes by reading Claudia Rankine’s Citizen at a Donald Trump rally. Which book would you reach for to speak truth to power?Wouldn’t it be nice if you could make your...
View ArticleMy 12-hour Odyssey was magical. No wonder, when conventional art can be so...
Why our appetite for long-haul culture - from Homer to Wagner - is on the increaseOn Thursday night, my sleeping hours were invaded by the Odyssey, that most dreamlike of poems, with its monsters and...
View ArticleMy mother’s very special relationship
Goldie Morgentaler’s mother made a lifelong friend of a British soldier soon after she was liberated from a Nazi concentration camp in 1945. Living on different continents, they forged a special bondMy...
View ArticleModern Poetry in Translation is Ted Hughes’s greatest contribution
A chance suggestion of Hughes’s to Daniel Weissbort at a party in the early 60s led to the creation of a magazine that is still enthusiastically promoting poetry from around the world 50 years onTed...
View ArticleThe Importance of Elsewhere: Philip Larkin’s Photographs by Richard Bradford...
Philip Larkin’s astute pictures make a tantalising companion to his verseIn October 1947, Philip Larkin wrote to his friend Jim Sutton about a recent “act of madness” – he had spent £7 on a camera. The...
View ArticleMeet Nina Freeman, the punk poet of gaming
Video games don’t have to be about death and warfare. Emotional, intimate and sexually frank, Nina Freeman’s relationship-led adventures are revolutionising the genreThe couple are entwined on a small...
View ArticleStevie Smith: you’ve read the poems, now look at the pictures
Faber’s new Collected Poems & Drawings insists, rightly, that you look at Stevie Smith’s sketchings along with her poetryAlthough I will not be chucking out my beloved old editions of the works of...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Calling Card by Tracey Herd
A eulogy for a young writer who died in a car accident aged 22, this bright poem refuses mourning to insist that her unfinished legacy will endureCalling Card(i.m. Marina Keegan, 1989-2012)At the last...
View ArticleShelley, Johnson and the enemies of liberty | Letters
Having just completed a political biography of Shelley (Pluto Press), I was delighted to see that the “lost” poem, Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things, written in 1811 in support of Peter...
View ArticleCosta category awards 2015: tiny presses square up to big hitters
The shortlists for the five prizes include award-winners Anne Enright and Kate Atkinson – and a gothic thriller set in Morecambe Bay, with an original print run of 300An unsettling debut novel set on...
View ArticleThe Costa category shortlists 2015 – in pictures
This year’s five shortlists pit Alice in Wonderland against a 17th century diarist, a collection of sonnets against a hymn to male flesh, and English pastoral against stories of warContinue reading...
View ArticleAn Index of Metals review – a soprano and six naked men fall flat
Carriageworks, SydneyThis theatrical staging of Fausto Romitelli’s swansong is so earnest in its quest for profundity that its emotions seem overwrought, even sillyFor most of An Index of Metals,...
View Article'Our melting, shifting, liquid world': celebrities read poems on climate change
Actors including James Franco, Ruth Wilson, Gabriel Byrne, Maxine Peake, Jeremy Irons, Kelly Macdonald and Michael Sheen read a series of 21 poems on the theme of climate change, curated by UK poet...
View ArticleSaudi court sentences poet to death for renouncing Islam
Friends of Palestinian Ashraf Fayadh believe he is being punished for posting video showing religious police lashing a man in publicA Palestinian poet and leading member of Saudi Arabia’s nascent...
View ArticleClive James: ‘Poets in the free countries don’t get famous’
All real poets start off by being fascinated by the sound of words. Do they all write something but mean something else?My granddaughter has renamed her gerbils. They are now called Joey and Chandler,...
View ArticleThe Saturday poem: The Bible
by Neil RollinsonBig as a suitcase, heavyas a log, the cover wrinkledin elephant skin.Budby opened the book,and the frontispiece lit up the room;there were angels and saints,all the shimmering...
View ArticleKenneth Goldsmith interview: ‘I wanted to take Walter Benjamin off the...
The controversial author on turning an autopsy report into poetry, not reading his own books and his golden love letter to New YorkHow apt to be meeting Kenneth Goldsmith at Eisenberg’s. An old-school...
View ArticleBook of limericks transforms struggling author Ranjit Bolt into literary lion
Ranjit Bolt has won plaudits with A Lion Was Learning to SkiIn the summer of 2014, the spectacle of a middle-aged playwright selling limericks about “comedic giraffes” and “Spanish cicadas” was a...
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