Poetry Society top prize explores familial discord
Eric Berlin wins prestigious award with poem Night Errand, while David Morley takes Ted Hughes prizeA poem exploring the fleeting flashes of anger we direct at our family, and the shame that it brings,...
View ArticleKate Tempest: ‘It’s difficult to look at words as pegs to hang a plot from’
She has written poetry, plays and an album – but the greatest challenge has been her new novelAt the beginning of an idea, there is the feeling that it could go anywhere, but it usually wants to be...
View ArticleEileen Myles: ‘My next book’s about a time-travelling dog’
The poet and writer, 66, on punk poetry, seeing her own funeral and dating younger womenIf I hadn’t given up drinking, I’d be dead. I’ll be 33 years sober in May, and I’m 66 years old. Thirty-three has...
View ArticleThe Saturday Poem: Night Errand
by Eric Berlin, winner of the National Poetry Competition 2015O, Great Northern Mall, you dwindling oracleof upstate New York, your colossal lotof frost-heaved spaces so vacant I could cutstraight...
View ArticlePapusza review – ponderous tale of a Polish poet
This biopic of Romany poet Bronislawa Wajs features a little too much landscape and not enough lifeIf you like artfully crafted old-school black-and-white cinematography, of the sort that distinguished...
View ArticleAusterity Measures: The New Greek Poetry – review
This literary response to the financial crisis gives a fascinating insight into Greece’s emotional mood and hopes for the futureAccording to Karen Van Dyck, a professor of modern Greek literature at...
View ArticlePoem of the week: The Dogs by Sam Buchan-Watts
This technically ambitious poem may suggest a variety of readings, but it gives vivid, singular life to its subjectThe DogsMy most cherished photographstransformed overnight into those of dogs:big...
View ArticleCalvin Trillin defends his Chinese food poem in the New Yorker
The 80-year-old writer is facing accusations of racism (at worst) and tone-deafness (at best) over his poem about Chinese food in the New YorkerIt hasn’t been a good week for America’s octogenarian...
View ArticleEdward Thomas's In Pursuit of Spring - historic photo locations revisited
In 1913, poet Edward Thomas cycled from London to Somerset to “meet the spring”. The vivid account of his journey, In Pursuit of Spring, was published the following year. Thomas died on the western...
View ArticleThe Bricks that Built the Houses by Kate Tempest review – lyricism and...
Tempest’s angst-ridden visions of London life are inspirational, but there are times when her storytelling fails to convince‘Everywhere is monsters,” roars the beginning of Kate Tempest’s...
View ArticleFrom gay conspiracy to queer chic: the artists and writers who changed the world
For years gay people were tolerated in the arts – and were then accused of taking over. Gregory Woods traces the networks of writers, artists, intellectuals and film stars who transformed 20th-century...
View ArticleRussian poetry and poison with Luke Harding and Pussy Riot - books podcast
Guardian journalist Luke Harding and filmmaker Peter Pomerantsev discuss the assassination of Aleksander Litvinenko, and Masha Aloykhina of Pussy Riot shares the poetry that helped her survive prisonIn...
View ArticleI love you, said my mother – words I’d waited to hear all my life
Patrick Deeley grew up in a large, close, gregarious family who could talk about everything … except their feelingsThe phone line crackled. My sense of someone there faded, returned. I still had to get...
View ArticleMichael Hofmann: ‘English is basically a trap: class trap, dialect trap,...
The influential Anglo-German poet, critic and translator on how he came to be depicted as a lit‑crit Johnny FartpantsThe savagery with which Michael Hofmann can wield a hatchet has earned him unlikely...
View ArticleMy Hero: my English teacher by Andrew Motion
In his introduction and previously unpublished poem, the former poet laureate recalls how Peter Way, who died last month, nurtured his love of literatureI’ve yet to meet the writer who didn’t have an...
View ArticleThe 100 best nonfiction books: No 11 – North by Seamus Heaney (1975)
This raw, tender, unguarded collection transcends politics, reflecting Heaney’s desire to move ‘like a double agent among the big concepts’Alongside his friend Ted Hughes (No 4 in this series), Seamus...
View ArticlePoem of the week: Sonnet XIII by William Shakespeare
With its message of entreaty to a young man to marry and become a father, this sonnet could be read as a covert love letter or the writer merely playing a roleSonnet XIIIO! that you were your self;...
View ArticleEnglish Renaissance Poetry review – a manual on how to write verse
Shakespeare, Donne and Jonson are all represented in this punchy and sinuous anthology, chosen by Stoner author John WilliamsThe American author and academic John Williams wrote three acclaimed novels...
View ArticleFrankenstein read by Damian Lewis and Helen McCrory – video
Actors Helen McCrory and Damian Lewis read extracts from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein at the Keats-Shelley Prize 2016 in London, marking 200 years since the novel’s inception. Shelley wrote Frankenstein...
View ArticleDamian Lewis and Helen McCrory reanimate Frankenstein for Keats-Shelley prize
Seven winners share £4,000 for works inspired by Frankenstein as the award marks 200 years since the novel’s inceptionThe winners of the Keats-Shelley prize for essays and poems have been announced at...
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