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 was trained by poetry where you can just write ambience and atmosphere. But in a novel, if there's not a story that people are interested in, with characters that they care about, they'll close the book.'
In the third in a series on the implications of AI for publishing, Nadim Sadek argues that effective advertising is now feasible for everyone, and for all kinds of titles
A publishing friend of mine recently told me about a sales report they'd received from a major retailer in which some of their books had zero sales. It turned out that there had been plenty of sales, however-they just all went to counterfeiters. In case you think this is an outlier, it's not. Counterfeiting is a serious, nontrivial problem facing the industry.
If you read the recently unsealed materials from the federal antitrust lawsuit against Amazon, you'll see why the company wanted to keep them under wraps. According to the unredacted notes from one meeting, Jeff Bezos directed his team to stuff more ads into search results, even if it meant accepting more ads internally categorized as irrelevant to what users were looking for. Read more
The U.K. Publishers Association (PA) was established in 1896 and is a cornerstone of the British publishing industry, working with a diverse array of companies to promote innovation, collaboration, and commercial success. Read more
With English as a shared language, there is a natural relationship between the American and British publishing industries. Most of the world's top publishing companies, be they conglomerates or independent publishers, have operations in each country, typically in New York City and London. Literary traffic travels both ways across the Atlantic.
The UK is experiencing a boom in book clubs, according to new data from event listing companies.
Book club listings on the ticketing site Eventbrite increased by 350% between 2019 and 2023 - a "much stronger" growth than the overall increase in UK-based listings over the same period. Between 2022 and 2023 alone, book club listings on the site rose by 41%. Read more
"We don't understand the consequences of AI with regards to copyright," Brazil's Karine Gonçalves Pansa, president of the International Publishers Association (IPA), said, when asked to name the most important issues facing publishing right now. "We can say, very easily, that our content is being used, without permission, and without license, by AI."
'What makes you a poet is a gift for language, an ability to see into the heart of things, and an ability to deal with important unconscious material. When all these things come together, you're a poet. But there isn't one little gimmick that makes you a poet. There isn't any formula for it.'