We keep you updated on the world of poetry with our news roundups.
Although William Ernest Henley was a poet he was, in truth, better known as an editor and critic. He was, in fact, unknown as a poet until his 36th year and confessed himself “unmarketable” as a poet prior to 1887. Whether his generally poor health from boyhood up to then had anything to do with it is uncertain, but there is no ...
Gabriela Mistral became a cultural icon amongst all Hispanic people in 1945 when she became the first Spanish American to win the Nobel Prize for literature. Her writing was influenced greatly by her humble beginnings in Chile which saw her family living in poverty. She became well known as a poet who wrote with a great deal of love and respect for ...
Although Gertrude Stein is remembered as an innovative, somewhat outlandish American poet and writer of prose, she actually spent the last 43 years of her life as a leading light on the Paris art scene where she lived from 1903. She was an avid collector or fine art and her salon in central Paris was well known as a meeting place for ...
William Stafford was a much-published writer who grew up in America’s mid-West at the time of the Depression. He was a well-educated man who came relatively late to further education which was interrupted when the United States joined the Second World War. Stafford, though, was a dedicated pacifist and spent the war years working on special camps for conscientious objectors. Following this ...
James Weldon Johnson was a man of immense and varied talents, who was a novelist, poet and noted civil rights activist. He was born June 17th 1871 in Jacksonville, which is located in Florida, USA to James Johnson and Helen Dillet who was a musician and grammar school teacher. His father was a head waiter at a luxury hotel and it was the ...
Tupac Shakur, rap artist, actor and poet, was one of the best-selling music artistes ever, selling over 75 million records worldwide. Rolling Stone magazine rated him 86th out the top 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. He was nominated twice in his career; in 1995 for best actor in Poetic Justice and in 2004 for best song – Resurrection. He was born Lesane ...
Nizar Qabbani was a Syrian-born poet, lawyer and diplomat who lived for much of his life outside of the middle east where he was able to express himself with a great deal more freedom than would have been allowed in his homeland. His work was often seen as a homage to womanhood and he campaigned staunchly for their equal rights. Losing his ...
Imagine, if you can, writing something that will one day be known universally as "the Great American Novel." Mark Twain did just that with Adventures of Huckleberry Finn which was published in 1885. It’s predecessor, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, came out nine years earlier and both became worldwide favourites and are still read today over a century later. Mark Twain ...
Fernando Pessoa was a Portuguese poet of the early 20th century who lived and died with very little recognition from the general public although one critic in the literary business described him as “the most representative poet of the twentieth century, along with Pablo Neruda”. Perhaps he would have become better known in his lifetime had he actually signed off all ...
Countee Cullen was a very private man and there are conflicting accounts of where and when he was born. Details of his early family life are sketchy but seem, by all accounts, to have been extremely traumatic for him. The fact that he, through his own efforts and tenacity, dragged himself up to a level where he gained a masters degree and ...
