This week in our poetry news round up we look at the death of the poet and translator Mary de Rachewiltz, keeper of Ezra Pound’s legacy, and the announcement of the 2026 Booker Prize longlist.
Poet and Translator Mary de Rachewiltz Dies Aged 101
Mary de Rachewiltz, the Italian-American poet and translator who spent much of her long life as the custodian of her father’s literary estate, has died at the age of 101. She died on July 24th at Brunnenburg, the castle in the Italian Tyrol that had been her home for some seventy years.
She was born Maria Rudge in Brixen in July 1925, the daughter of the American poet Ezra Pound and the violinist Olga Rudge. Pound was married to Dorothy Shakespear at the time and unable to raise the child, so Mary was placed with a Tyrolean farming couple and grew up in a German-speaking mountain village, seeing her parents only occasionally at Olga’s apartment in Venice. She recounted that strange, divided childhood in her memoir Discretions, published in 1971 and later reissued as Ezra Pound, Father and Teacher. It remains one of the essential first-hand accounts of Pound’s life, and Robert Fitzgerald described it as a work of literature in its own right.
In 1946 she married the Egyptologist Boris de Rachewiltz, and the couple bought and restored Brunnenburg, a thirteenth-century castle above Merano. Pound himself lived there with the family for a period after his release from St Elizabeths Hospital, and the castle went on to house the Ezra Pound Center for Literature, along with an American university exchange programme through which de Rachewiltz taught courses on her father’s work to generations of visiting students.
Her own writing and translating ran alongside the work of preservation. She translated e.e. cummings into Italian in the early 1960s, and published poetry of her own including Whose World? Selected Poems and For the Wrong Reason. In the 1980s she completed the first dual-language Italian edition of The Cantos, an undertaking that won her the Città di Monselice prize in 1986, and she later returned to the material with Veneziane Cantos. She served as curator of the Ezra Pound Archive at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and in 2011 co-edited a collection of Pound’s letters, Ezra Pound to His Parents, with the biographer David Moody.
She celebrated her hundredth birthday at Brunnenburg in July 2025 and remained there, still climbing the hill to greet arriving students, until the end. She is survived by her two children, Siegfried and Patrizia.
Two Poets Make the 2026 Booker Prize Longlist
The longlist for the 2026 Booker Prize was announced on Tuesday July 28th, and this year’s “Booker Dozen” has a good deal in it for poetry readers.
Two of the thirteen longlisted novelists are established poets. Luke Kennard, named one of the Poetry Book Society’s Next Generation Poets in 2014 and winner of the 2021 Forward Prize for Best Collection with Notes on the Sonnets, his anarchic response to Shakespeare, is longlisted for Black Bag, his third novel and a satire about an out-of-work actor hired to sit zipped inside a leather bag at the back of a university lecture theatre. Rebecca Perry, whose debut collection Beauty/Beauty was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, makes the list with May We Feed the King, a first novel that had already won this year’s Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize.
There is a strong poetry presence on the panel too. Chaired by the classicist Mary Beard, the judges include the poet and memoirist Raymond Antrobus and the novelist and poet Patricia Lockwood, herself shortlisted for the Booker in 2021 and a winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize that same year. Jarvis Cocker and the critic Rebecca Liu complete the line-up.
The thirteen books were chosen from 163 submissions. Past winners Marlon James and Douglas Stuart are back in contention, alongside the three-time nominee Elizabeth Strout, and the list ranges in age from a 28-year-old debut novelist to the 81-year-old M. John Harrison, who would become the oldest ever recipient should he win. Beard said that every writer on the list musters the power of words on the page to take the reader to new places and change minds.
The shortlist will be announced at the Southbank Centre in London on September 22nd, with the winner revealed at Old Billingsgate on November 9th. The winner receives £50,000 and each shortlisted author £2,500.
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