We keep you updated on the world of poetry with our news roundups.
J.R.R. Tolkien will forever be known as the creator of such memorable characters as hobbits and wizards, and the mythical world of Middle Earth, but he was also a prolific poet. Born in South Africa in 1892, he came to England with his mother three years later for a long family visit, but his father died and they remained in the ...
Irishman Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin in 1667 and is probably best known today for the fantasy work Gulliver’s Travels. As a satirist, cleric and poet he has influenced writers and artists down the ages, including John Ruskin and George Orwell. Although known for his writing, he also went on to become Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in ...
Known for popular historical novels such as Ivanhoe and The Pirate, writer and poet Sir Walter Scott was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1771. He is notable in that he was popular throughout his lifetime and earned an international reputation that was highly unusual for the time. Many of his works are still seen as classics today and they have been ...
Considered one of the greatest Polish literary figures Czeslaw Milosz was born the 30th June 1911 to a Catholic family in the small village of Szetejnie, which was part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. His father Aleksander was a qualified civil engineer, whilst his mother Weronika was of noble descent. Fluent in Polish, Lithuanian, Russian and French, he saw himself as ...
Lisel Mueller was born in Germany in 1924 but when the Nazi’s came into power her family immigrated to America where she became a much loved poet and translator. Her work explores the difference between what we present publicly and our private, individual selves that people rarely get to see. Over the years she has collected many literary awards including the ...
Son of a wine merchant and born in London around 1340, Geoffrey Chaucer is often considered as the first truly great English writer and is most well-known for his work The Canterbury Tales. Familiar to literary students across the world, this series of poems recounts the stories of various people whilst on a pilgrimage to Canterbury and is written in Middle ...
Argentinian poet Jorge Luis Borges was born in Buenos Aires in 1899 and went on to win an international reputation for both his writing and his work as a translator. His work has embraced both the fantastical and the surreal, exploring wide ranging topics such as philosophy, religion and what was later called magical realism. Although more well-known for his short ...
At various times a journalist, university lecturer, and even pub landlady, poet Jenny Joseph was born in 1932 in Birmingham, England. Thanks to a scholarship, she studied literature at Oxford and there began writing poetry, publishing her first collection in the 1950s. After some time working on newspapers in the UK, Joseph moved for a while to South Africa to write ...
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. was an American doctor, poet, professor and author. Born 29th August 1809 in Cambridge, in Massachusetts USA he was the firstborn son to Sarah Wendell, who came from a wealthy family and Abiel Holmes, a Calvinist Church minister. His son of the same name would go on to be a prominent justice of the Supreme Court of ...
Phillip Edward Thomas is one of the names on a slate stone in Poet’s Corner, Westminster Abbey, which commemorates the sixteen “Great War Poets”. It is alongside the likes of Wilfred Own and Rupert Brooke, so Thomas’s name will therefore be immortalised as a war poet although most of his work was written before he ever went to war. In ...
