We keep you updated on the world of poetry with our news roundups.
Here is a Serbian poet who grew up at a time of deep unrest across the whole of Europe. He fought as a partisan during WWII and was captured and interned in a Nazi concentration camp. Having survived that he lived through the oppressive times that saw communism dominate the whole of central and eastern Europe for decades. Despite the state’s efforts ...
Linda Pastan is an American poet and essay writer who is known chiefly for writing short poems about family life and motherhood. A populist poet, she brings a unique feminine perspective to issues such as ageing, loss, death and the fragility of family relationships. One of her most recent poems is Travelling Light, from 2011, and illustrates her style: I am only leaving you, ...
Born in Ireland in 1844, John Boyle O’Reilly was one of the most popular poets of the era, a prolific writer and often an outspoken critic of the situation of the Irish. At a young age he joined the Fenian movement and was imprisoned and deported for it, ending up in Australia before escaping penal servitude and forging a life ...
Born into the Elizabethan era, in 1554, Philip Sidney was known as a poet and soldier and was a prominent feature of the court at the time. He came from an influential family and was educated at Shrewsbury School and then Oxford, before being elected to Parliament at the age of just 18. Traveling widely through Europe in his youth, ...
Jessie Pope was an English poet, writer and journalist who divided opinion quite dramatically with her motivational style of poetry during the first world war. Almost every line she wrote seemed to be a call to arms, up and at ‘em and to hell with the Kaiser. While she was lauded by many as just the kind writer that was needed to ...
Born in 1913 in the heart of Utah, May Swenson grew up in a Mormon family, the oldest out of 10 children. She realized that she was a lesbian from an early age and was shunned in later life by her family who held strong religious beliefs. As a girl she was greatly influenced by the work of Edgar Allen Poe ...
Born in 1940 in Michigan, an orphan who spent his fifteenth year incarcerated in a mental hospital and faked his death at just the age of 26, Bill Knott, also known as Saint Geraud, was one of the most enigmatic American poets of the 20th Century. Often verging on the surreal, Knott’s poetry covers a range of subject matter from the way ...
Heinrich Heine was a Jewish born poet who became a highly controversial figure in German literature and was also something of a visionary. He quite clearly prophesied the terrible times to come for the Jewish people in a play that he wrote in 1821. In Almansor he wrote about the burning of books for political or religious reasons and the line: "Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, ...
Faiz Ahmed Faiz wrote poetry in the Urdu language while holding strong political views all through his life that often got him into trouble with the law. He served a number of prison sentences because of his beliefs but it never changed him. He was a committed communist and was so highly thought of by the Soviets that he was awarded ...
There cannot be many writers in the world who have written a book and then had a seaside resort named after that book, but Charles Kingsley was such a man. He wrote a novel in 1855 called Westward Ho! about sailors from a south western English town who set sail across the Atlantic to battle with the Spanish in the Caribbean. The ...
