Quiz: 2015 in books – how closely were you reading?
Who found the manuscript for Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman? Which taunt did Martin Amis level at Jeremy Corbyn? And who hasn’t had an adult colouring book devoted to them (yet)? Test your knowledge of...
View ArticleThe best feasts quotes in literature
From Keats to Harry Potter to Christina Rossetti to Wind in the Willows, we have mouthwatering quotes from the greatest literary feasts to whet your appetite for Christmas indulgences[…] he forth from...
View ArticleThe Wren-Boys
A new Christmas poem by Carol Ann DuffyThe old year, a tear in the eye of time; frost on the blackthorn, the ditches glamorous with rime; on the inbreath of air,the long, thoughtful pause before snow.A...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Visiting Star by Stanley Moss
A trick of the light provides the relaxed occasion for an irreverent contemplation of religious myths Visiting StarI woke at sunrise,fed my dogs, Honie and Margie –to the east a wall of books and...
View ArticlePoet Robin Coste Lewis: 'I am an artist through to my marrow'
Brought up in Compton, Lewis overcame brain damage to become a poet, and this year won the National Book Award for The Voyage of the Sable Venus, which eloquently expresses her preoccupations with...
View ArticleRudyard Kipling: an unexpected revival for the ‘bard of empire’
‘Vulgar rabble-rouser’, ‘rootless cosmopolitan’, ‘mouthpiece of the empire’ … Kipling has had his share of detractors. But, 150 years after his birth, interest in India’s greatest English-language...
View ArticleClaudia Rankine: ‘Blackness in the white imagination has nothing to do with...
The award-winning poet on Serena Williams, her emotional book signings and why racism is inescapableYour book, Citizen: An American Lyric, has won the National Book Critics’ Circle poetry award in the...
View ArticlePoem of the week: The Three Rs by Kelly Grovier
A consideration of changing worlds, personal and planetary, with appropriately shifting registersThe Three RsThe world always beginswith a phrase – instinctive,Continue reading...
View ArticlePoetry used as 'a perfect weapon' for recruiting violent jihadis, study finds
Arab cultural traditions have made poetry a potent tool for promoting extremism, according to research by Oxford academicPoetry may be a potent tool in recruiting militant jihadis, a new study by...
View ArticleThe therapy that taught me – slowly – how to help myself | Megan Beech
My life at university was overshadowed by depression and anxiety. Counselling was no quick fix, but gradually it changed my entire outlook“I just worry about not having gained anything,” I mumbled...
View ArticleBig Bang Theory producers sued over use of Soft Kitty nursery rhyme
Daughters of New Hampshire teacher who wrote the 1930s ditty say sitcom makers used lyrics without their permissionThe children of a New Hampshire teacher are suing the producers and broadcasters of...
View ArticleMarjorie Oludhe Macgoye obituary
Kenyan writer whose novels and poetry focused on the country’s postcolonial transformation and social developmentThe British-born Kenyan writer Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye, who has died aged 87, told the...
View ArticleThe Beautiful Librarians by Sean O’Brien review – a bleak and comic lament...
A curmudgeonly portrait of British cultural life echoes Philip Larkin, WH Auden and Jim Royle‘Poets grow older; verse turns from passion into habit: but only the first condition is inevitable.” When...
View ArticleChinese publisher pulls 'vulgar' translation of Indian poet
Feng Tang’s interpretation of Nobel prize-winning Rabindranath Tagore criticised for lines such as ‘the world unzipped his pants in front of his lover’A Chinese publisher has recalled the latest...
View ArticleThe Observances review – a collaboration with the waves
Kate Miller’s brilliant debut is so steeped in the sea, it’s almost as if the ocean were co-author of these calm, elegant piecesIn The Observances, Kate Miller elevates the art of looking into...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Poulain the Prisoner by Augusta Webster
An affecting 1881 triptych about the mysterious artist-prisoner who left a mural on the wall of a medieval French prisonContinue reading...
View ArticleOlwyn Hughes obituary
Literary agent with a fearsome reputation who was devoted to the work of her brother, Ted Hughes, and the posthumous literary life of his wife Sylvia PlathIn a photograph of Ted Hughes from his youth,...
View ArticleMuseum asks for help finding 1,000 first editions of Theodore Roethke debut
Theodore Roethke Home museum in Michigan asks owners of hand-numbered copies of Open House to get in touch, for ‘census’ to mark 75th anniversary of poetry collectionGuardian Witness: Do you own any...
View ArticlePoster poems: clay
That from which the first man was made, or the ground in which nothing grows … clay has associations with both creation and decay. Send us your poems about the sticky stuff, either wayWhen you hear the...
View ArticleNot in This World by Tracey Herd review – a study of private betrayal and...
The ‘sexy suffering’ of shattered Hollywood dreams inform a long-awaited collection from the Scottish poetThere has been a long interval between Tracey Herd’s second collection, Dead Redhead (2001),...
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