Poet

Javier Marías won’t get the Nobel prize that many people, including me, think he deserved. No matter. He had plenty of prizes while he was alive. The greater loss is that we won’t get any more of his extraordinary novels. There is no other writer like him, certainly not in English. He was a complete original, at ease with philosophy and pop-cultural trivia, genre and literary fiction. He looked the great writers of the past, from many national traditions, squarely and companionably in the eye.Marías, perhaps above all,…

The poet laureate, Simon Armitage, has released a poem to mark the death of Queen Elizabeth II. Floral Tribute, which has been distributed by Armitage’s publisher, Faber, is a double acrostic, with two verses consisting of nine lines, the first letters of which spell Elizabeth, a nod perhaps to funeral floral arrangements that spell out the deceased person’s name.The poet directly references himself in the first verse: “I have conjured a lily to light these hours, a token of thanks.” Armitage thanks the Queen for her gift…

Peter Strickland is cinema’s elegant poet of fetish and rapture and oddity, creating movies that are like double-gatefold electro-pop concept albums full of deadpan not-exactly-comedy and strange mitteleuropaïsch pastiche. After his relatively conventional debut in 2009, the psychological drama Katalin Varga, Strickland moved into horror and eroticism – or, at any rate, into a world stylistically adjacent to scary or sexy, with his quasi-giallo homages: Berberian Sound Studio in 2012, with Toby Jones as the tormented…

The first work of fiction by American poet and Nobel laureate Louise Glück is to be published in the UK later this year.Marigold and Rose: A Fiction is a “prose narrative” about the twins of the title, and follows them in the first year of their life as they “begin to piece together the world as they move between Mother’s stories of ‘Long, long ago’ and Father’s ‘Once upon a time’”.The book, which is just 64 pages long and will be released in October, is an “investigation of the great mystery of language and of time…

When Nikita Gill was growing up, she was constantly told she was oversensitive. It was a label she didn’t like, even if it did seem fairly accurate. “I used to feel things really deeply all the time,” she says. “The world is overwhelming, especially when you’re young.” Today, Gill is Britain’s most followed poet, with more than a million fans online, who feel that her fine-tuned emotions are not her weakness, but her superpower.On Instagram, TikTok and elsewhere, Gill posts stylish snippets of her work which are savoured…

Fifteen years ago, Wimbledon singer-songwriter Jamie Treays – AKA Jamie T – released his debut album, Panic Prevention. Armed with a guitar, a palpitating sense of social anxiety and a shouty vocal that often veered into an MCing style, Treays anointed himself the chip-shop troubadour of the mid-00s.His were meandering, confessional songs, telling cautionary tales of London’s seedy underbelly (Sheila), forlorn searches for love (If You Got the Money), and the crushing pressures of the smoke-filled city (So Lonely Was the…

Percy Bysshe Shelley: poet, atheist, and determined opponent of the over-powerful. What would he have made of the dramatic resignation this week by Boris Johnson after weeks of his authority ebbing away? A flight of fancy of course, but an irresistible one for me, whose working life these last days and weeks has been dominated by the disintegration of Johnson’s credibility. All the while I’ve been preparing – in my downtime – to commemorate 200 years since the death of a titan of English poetry and a political…

Hanan Issa, a Welsh-Iraqi poet, film-maker and artist, has been named the fifth national poet of Wales.As national poet Issa, who is due to serve a three-year term, will represent the diverse cultures and languages of Wales and act as an ambassador for the people of Wales.Issa’s collection My Body Can House Two Hearts was published in 2019. She also contributed to Welsh (Plural): Essays on the Future of Wales and The Mab, a retelling of the Mabinogi stories for children, both published this year.She co-founded the Cardiff…

Editor's Note: The book, For The Love of God: Women Poet Saints of the Bhakti Movement written by Sandhya Mulchandani sheds light on how women in India, between 3rd Century BC and AD, boycotted the patriarchal norms and customs of the society to embrace the Bhakti Movement. Regardless of what social backgrounds they came from -- prostitutes, Rajputs, Brahmins, and Sudras -- many women came forth to claim their place in this religious movement, which did not discriminate on the basis of gender. They freed themselves from…

Recently unveiled letters from TS Eliot to his muse Emily Hale show how much he loved his longtime friend, but a statement from beyond the grave by the poet himself dismisses his feelings and shows how Eliot tries to rewrite the narrative of their relationship, scholars say. Hale donated Eliot's letters to Princeton University Library more than 60 years ago with instructions that they could only be opened 50 years after she and Eliot died. The day they were made available at the Ivy League school, Eliot's…