This week in our poetry news round up we look at the announcement of the new Waterstones Children’s Laureate and the record-making sale of a rare medieval Arthurian manuscript.
Patrice Lawrence Named Waterstones Children’s Laureate
Patrice Lawrence © David Bebber
Author Patrice Lawrence has been announced as the new Waterstones Children’s Laureate for 2026–2028. The bestselling writer, known for her 2016 debut novel Orangeboy, was presented with the bespoke silver laureate medal by the outgoing laureate, Frank Cottrell-Boyce, at a ceremony held at the Barbican Centre in London on Tuesday 7th July. The laureateship, which is managed by the reading charity BookTrust and sponsored by Waterstones, is awarded every two years to a writer or illustrator in recognition of exceptional talent, and the holder acts as the foremost champion of children’s literature, reading and storytelling in the UK.
Lawrence, who was made an MBE for services to literature in 2021 and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2023, becomes the fourteenth holder of the post, following in the footsteps of Quentin Blake, Michael Morpurgo, Jacqueline Wilson and Julia Donaldson – and, of particular interest to poetry lovers, the poets Michael Rosen and Joseph Coelho, who both used their tenures to put verse at the heart of children’s reading. Addressing what she called our “times of fragmentation”, Lawrence said her tenure would champion the power of books to make us feel like we belong, and shared stories as a tool for bringing people together. She certainly has her work cut out; recreational reading among children and teenagers in the UK is at a two-decade low, with just one-third of eight to eighteen year olds saying they enjoy reading in their spare time. Her appointment also arrives in the middle of the National Year of Reading, the major campaign from the Department for Education aimed at getting the nation back in love with books.
Arthurian “Grail” Manuscript Fetches Over £2.2 Million
A rather older piece of literary history made headlines this week when the illuminated manuscript known as the Clermont-Tonnerre Grail, which recounts the story of King Arthur and the quest for the Holy Grail, sold on Wednesday for £2,246,000 – around three million dollars – at auction in London. The sale took place at Christie’s as part of its Valuable Books and Manuscripts auction, where the manuscript carried an estimate of between £1.5 million and £2 million, and marked the first time the work had ever been offered for sale, having spent some 700 years in private hands without ever being publicly exhibited or exhaustively studied.
Dating from around 1290–1310 and thought to have been produced by the anonymous artist known as the Master of the Liège Apocalypse, the manuscript contains three romances from the Vulgate, or Lancelot-Grail, Cycle and is decorated with 126 miniature illuminations – one of which shows Merlin shape-shifting into a stag. Though the Vulgate Cycle itself is prose, it sits firmly within a tradition that began in verse: the first great Arthurian work in Old French was Wace’s Roman de Brut of 1155, written in octosyllabic rhyming couplets, and the legends would of course go on to inspire poets for centuries, most famously Alfred Lord Tennyson in his Idylls of the King. Scholars had voiced hopes that the manuscript would find its way into a public collection where it could finally be studied, though the identity of the buyer has not been made public.
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