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Poets

Poetry sales boom

16 April 2018

There's good news in Bookbrunch about poetry sales coming from the UK, the market is up two-thirds since 2012. A 66% increase in poetry sales over the past five years has led to a million poetry books being sold with a total value of £1.1m. There has been a boom in poetry events and festivals, with increased interest in the work of living poets with strong online followings.  Read more

London Book Fair buoyant

9 April 2018

This week's London Book Fair has been a buzzy and optimistic occasion, as publishers from around the world gathered to sell rights to the international market. Second only to the Frankfurt Book FairWorld's largest trade fair for books; held annually mid-October at Frankfurt Trade Fair, Germany; First three days exclusively for trade visitors; general public can attend last two., the LBF punches above its weight in terms of its usefulness to publishers.  Read more

The T S Eliot Prize Readings

8 January 2018

We don't often cover a specific event, but if you like poetry and are in reach of London this weekend, don't miss a wonderful evening of poetry.  Read more

National Poetry Day 2017 celebrates Freedom

18 September 2017

Next Thursday, 28 September, is National Poetry Day in the UK and a good template of how a national celebration for poetry can achieve real reach. The BBC, schools, poets, publishers, bookshops and readers are uniting to bring about a real celebration of poetry. Poets in particular will be very much in evidence, with a mass of events and school visits to celebrate the day.  Read more

Focus on poetry

19 June 2017

Tracy K Smith has been named US Poet Laureate and in the UK National Writing Day has brought a focus on poetry, with two new articles available from the Poetry School.  Read more

Paying poets

12 December 2016

Poetry is not often the focus of attention, but this week we've chosen to feature two links to substantial articles which look at the state of poetry and how poets can be supported, from different sides of the Atlantic. Both are worth reading by anyone who is concerned about the state of the poetry world.  Read more

'A poet for dark and dangerous days' wins 2014 T S Eliot Prize

12 January 2015

When David Harsent received the 2014 T S Eliot Prize for Poetry in the elegant surroundings of the Courtyard at the Wallace Collection in London, he had won a prize which has recently been increased to £20,000, the richest prize in British poetry.  Read more

Next Generation Poets 2014 - is this how to promote poetry?

15 September 2014

So just how do you go about promoting poetry and poets? There are lots of answers to this and many poets are very successful at promoting themselves through a combination of their publisher's efforts or self-publishing, through readings, performances and getting their work into poetry magazines, online or other kinds of promotion.  Read more

Does poetry matter?

28 July 2014

As two of this week's links demonstrate, poetry is contradictory in its audience and reach.

A huge audience is interested in poetry - more than one million people read poems at poets.org each year. But on the other hand poetry book sales, in the US as elsewhere, are meagre for all but the very best-known poets.  Read more

The T S Eliot Prize 20th Anniversary Tour

16 September 2013

It's 60 years since T S Eliot, acting on a suggestion from his friend the poet Stephen Spender, worked with his friends to set up the Poetry Book Society to encourage poetry readers and bring the best new poetry to them.  Read more

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'Anybody who claims that one genre is categorically superior to all others must be ready and able to defend their prejudice. And that involves knowing what the ‘inferior' genres actually consist of, their nature and their forms of excellence. It involves reading them.'

— Ursula K. Le Guin

'A projection back of modern sensibilities'

9 September 2024

‘It's difficult, perhaps impossible, to write a character well in the past who is not a projection back of modern sensibilities. My defence would be that the 16th century was the time when rational, sceptical inquiry was beginning. This was the age of the humanists: we're leaving medieval thought patterns behind.  Read more

26 August 2024 - What's new

August 2024
  • ‘You can offend somebody in the 21st century with something you said in 1970... By the end of the process I was questioning myself, that was the problem. I wrote innocently and I wrote to make people laugh but when I read the book through I thought, gosh, really, is this offensive? And that? And that? Am I all these things?
  Read more