The art world has the National Gallery; drama has the National Theatre. Now poet laureate Simon Armitage is putting plans in motion for a National Poetry Centre "headquarters" in Leeds. Read more
The poet laureate's new prize for a collection that focuses on the environment highlights a crisis that can no longer be ignored, plus an exclusive new poem
When you read a poem, you might be struck by its form on the page, the page etched with careful words, the words teased into line breaks. But when you hear it? Then you meet the poem in a more intimate space.
For years, audiobooks and poetry readings have used the authority of voice to bring poems to life. But there's another, newer platform I want to talk about: the podcast. Read more
Poet Simon Armitage, whose "witty and profound" work spans sharp observations about modern life and classical myths, is to be the UK's next Poet Laureate.
The West Yorkshire writer will hold the historic post for the next decade, taking over from Dame Carol Ann Duffy. Read more
This year, the Mellon Foundation provided $2.2 million in funding to the Academy of American PoetsThe website of the wonderful Academy, which was founded in 1934 to support American poets at all stages of their careers and to foster the appreciation of contemporary poetry. Any poet or poetry lover would find it worth a visit., which is using the money to further the work of the Poetry Coalition and to grant fellowships to poets laureate across the U.S. The funding, the Academy said, was the largest sum of its kind provided to poets in the U.S. at any one time by a charitable organization. Read more
Why produce a daily podcast? If your subject matter is the news, it's the only time frame that can keep up with the snowball-rolling-down-Mt.-Everest pace of what's going on. If your subject matter is poetry, the point is to slow everything down and keep slowing everything down.
In the mid-1990s, when I was a student of creative writing, there prevailed a quiet but firm admonition to avoid composing political poems. It was too dangerous an undertaking, one likely to result in didacticism and slackened craft. Read more
Language is our greatest invention. As a device for understanding ourselves and the world, nothing else comes close. Poetry is language at its keenest, and the poetry of these islands is our greatest achievement.
‘I always quote Kurt Vonnegut. He said in the early part of his career he was dismissed as a science fiction writer and that critics tend to put genre books, including sci-fi, in the bottom drawer of their desk... It's true. I get the New York Times every Sunday. In 37 novels, I've never had a stand-alone review. I'm always in the crime round-up.
A survey of 787 members of the Society of Authors (SoA) has found that a third of translators and a quarter of illustrators have lost work to generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. Translators are also more likely to use AI to support their work, with 37% of respondents saying they have done so, followed by 25% of non-fiction writers.
The author Lynne Reid Banks, known for her novel The L-Shaped Room and her children's book series The Indian in the Cupboard, has died at the age of 94.
I launched my podcast Making It Up nearly three years ago with the goal of interviewing writers not for any particular work of theirs, but to talk to them about their lives. I didn't want to ask them what famous author they want to have dinner with or what their top five favorite books are ... yech. Read more
Until we have a mechanism to test for artificial intelligence, writers need a tool to maintain trust in their work. So I decided to be completely open with my readers
'You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.'