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Biographer Stephen Gill: Wordsworth’s Prelude
The Reader’s outreach project, Get Into Reading, was kick-started by Melvyn Bragg’s Radio programme In Our Time. I was driving…
Featured Poem: Sonnet to William Wilberforce, Esq.
On November 26, 1731 the English poet and hymnodist William Cowper was born. Cowper trained as a lawyer but became…
Vernon Scannell 1922-2007
The poet Vernon Scannell died last weekend aged 85. He was a prolific writer: eight novels, autobiographical memoirs, works of…
Featured Anthology: Staying Alive – Brendan Kennelly
As the end of the week arrives and the last poem from our featured anthology Staying Alive is posted, it…
Featured Anthology: Staying Alive – Miroslav Holub
The fourth poet to feature from Staying Alive is Miroslav Holub, who was one of the Czech Republic's most important poets and also a leading scientist…
Featured Anthology: Staying Alive – David Constantine
As well as being a regular contributor to The Reader, David Constantine is a freelance writer, poet and translator. Possessing…
Featured Anthology: Staying Alive – Anne Stevenson
Anne Stevenson, a critic of Sylvia Plath and Elizabeth Bishop and a poet herself, was born in Cambridge in 1933…
Featured Anthology: Staying Alive – Denise Levertov
The first poem to feature from our second featured anthology, Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times, is 'Living' by…
The Death of the Book
On Monday the online retailer Amazon is tipped to release its electronic reading device known as the Kindle. This is…
Recommended Reads: The Secrets of Harry Bright
Steven Powell has an M.A. in Victorian Literature from the University of Liverpool, and is currently studying for a Literature…
Recommended Reads: ‘Adlestrop’, by Edward Thomas
By Julie-ann Rowell. Julie-ann is a poet whose first pamphlet collection, Convergence, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her new…
BBC Free Thinking Festival: Going Sane
Hands up... are you sane? (A few hands hover in the air)... Insane? (A similar number of hands are thrusted…
