We keep you updated on the world of poetry with our news roundups.
Denise Levertov was born in Essex in 1923. Her mother was Welsh while her father was a Russian born Hassidic Safardic Jew who migrated first to Germany and then to England. He later became an Anglican priest. At the tender age of five she declared that one day she would be a writer. True to her word she had a passion for ...
English playwright, poet and actor Ben Jonson was born in London June 11th 1572 to a family believed to be of Scottish descent. His clergyman father died before he was born and his mother remarried. He was fortunate to receive a classical education at the prestigious Westminster School, paid for by a family friend. Jonson wanted to continue his education at Cambridge ...
Born Judith Arundell Wright, 31st May 1915 in NSW Australia, she was one of Australia’s foremost poets and writer of short stories and children’s books. She spent much of her childhood in Brisbane and after the death of her mother, Ethel, was a boarder of a girls school in New England. After graduating ...
Antonio Machado came into the world in Seville, southern Spain in 1875. He was one of two brothers, only a year apart, and their father moved the family to Madrid when Antonio was 8 years old. While studying, with his older brother, at "Institución Libre de Enseñanza", Antonio found he had a talent for writing and a love of literature. Antonio was so ...
Here is a man, born in the year 1503, into one of the most turbulent times in English history, at Allington Castle in Kent. His father, Henry, was able to live in such a grand location due to his position as a Privy Councillor to King Henry VII and he continued in this role when Henry VIII succeeded to the throne. The ...
Now here is a curious thing: how can a man who was once appointed poet laureate of all England, succeeding no less than Alfred, Lord Tennyson by the way, be considered (in some quarters) to be “the worst and least read English poet”? That is what happened to Alfred Austin in 1896, a man who had spent his whole life writing and ...
Lucille Clifton was born Thelma Lucille Sayles into a working class New York family in June 1936. Her father was a steel worker and her mother bore six children. Graduating from High School Lucille won a scholarship to Howard University and then studied at the State University of New York at Fredonia, quite close to her home in Buffalo. Aged 22 she ...
Alan Alexander Milne was the famous writer of the much-loved Winnie the Pooh stories and is more generally known as A. A. Milne. Born in Kilburn, London in 1882 he spent his formative years living in a small independent school which his father, John Vine Milne ran. A. A. was fortunate to have visionary novelist H. G. Wells as one of his ...
Kenneth Adolf Slessor was born in Orange, New South Wales in 1901 to parents of German-Jewish origin. The family name was originally Schloesser and they moved to Sydney when Kenneth was two years old. The young boy loved to read and was encouraged by his parents to do so, along with teaching him to love music and appreciate good food. In short, ...
Poet, writer and translator, Boris Pasternak is probably best known for his epic work Dr Zhivago. He was born in Moscow in 1890, the son of Russian Jewish parents who were heavily involved in the arts – his father was a professor and painter and his mother was a concert pianist, and they were close friends with Leo Tolstoy. Whilst he initially ...
