We keep you updated on the world of poetry with our news roundups.
For many Australians, Louisa Lawson was a major force in allowing women to vote in the country but she was also a talented poet and journalist. She was born in Guntawang in New South Wales, the second of 12 children to Harriet and Henry Albury. Educated at Mudgee National School she was offered a chance to go into teaching when she ...
Poet Julian Tuwim was born into a middle class Jewish family in Lodz, Poland, in 1894 and went on to become one of the major figures in Polish poetry, helping to found the experimental Skamander group in 1918. As a young man he wasn’t considered to be committed to his studies and even had to re-sit his sixth grade at school. Living ...
More widely remembered for his sculpture of David and painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo Buonarroti was also a poet and engineer who was born in Tuscany in 1475. His father worked in a governmental position and his mother suffered from various ailments during his early life and died when he was just 6 years old. Michelangelo was interested in painting ...
Joseph O’Connor is a multi-award winning Dublin-born novelist, playwright, journalist and broadcaster. At the age of 51 he can look back on considerable success over his lifetime. He comes from a talented family of five children including the well-known singer and songwriter Sinead O’Connor who first came to international attention with her haunting song Nothing Compares to You. Another sister has taken ...
It would be fair to say that the Australian poet John Shaw Neilson succeeded as a popular poet despite his lack of sophistication and education. He was raised in a working class environment with very little schooling and spent a good part of his adult life doing manual labour on the construction of roads and dams. This he managed without being a ...
John Ruskin was a leading philanthropist of the 19th century who cared passionately about the poorer people in English society and the effects that the Industrial Revolution was having on their quality of life. He travelled widely, both as a boy with his family, and later in life. He loved the Alpine region and was influenced by the art, culture and architecture ...
Joseph Campbell was a relatively obscure Irish poet born in the late 19th century whose first language was Gaelic. Writing primarily in his native language he did, however, translate traditional poems and songs into English and he became best known for writing the words to accompany two famous Irish airs: My Lagan Love and Gartan Mother's Lullaby. Additionally, some of his poetry was ...
Born in Lincoln in 1703, John Wesley is most famous for being the founding father of Methodism but is was also a prolific writer of both prose and poetry. Wesley is noted for his clear writing and spiritual simplicity, something he may well have inherited from his poet father. At the age of 20, he followed in his father’s footsteps by ...
Born in Roxburghshire in Scotland around 1700, James Thomson is best known for providing the lyrics for the patriotic song Rule, Britannia and his masterful series of four poems under the collected title of The Seasons. Though his life was cut short by an untimely illness, his works are still well remembered today and he is seen as one of the ...
Born in 1828, Henry Timrod was an American poet who was strongly linked to the Confederate cause during the Civil War, writing many verses such as A Cry to Arms that did much to encourage men to enlist as hostilities got underway. Born in Charleston in the American South, his father was an amateur poet who ran a book binding shop ...
