'Today is a good day': Lemn Sissay awarded OBE in Queen's birthday honours list
Poet and playwright Lemn Sissay has been awarded the OBE in the new Queen’s birthday honours list. Sissay, who was previously awarded an MBE, said on Twitter: “Today is a good day.” Sissay, who is chancellor of Manchester University and current guest director of Brighton Festival, was born to an Ethiopian mother in Britain in 1966. A social worker assigned to his mother by Wigan social services found foster parents for Sissay,...
News and Opinion
Our first two poetry masterclasses were a roaring success. Delivered by Rachel Long and Caroline Bird respectively, they fully sold out and generated ...
3rd Jun 2021 12:00 am
Life & Rhymes, a four-part spoken word series on Sky Arts that was filmed during lockdown in a London park, was a surprise winner of the Bafta best e...
6th Jun 2021 9:39 pm
It’s all a question of timing if you want to succeed in sending the ball past the custodian – and in poetry, too. Here’s the ever-popular Brian Bilsto...
15th Jun 2021 3:55 pm
Luke Wright, this year’s Saboteur spoken word award winner and an indefatigable online performer during lockdown, is taking three different shows on t...
15th Jun 2021 1:38 pm
An album pairing spoken word artists with scientists is being launched by spoken word label Nymphs & Thugs. The Experimental Words album features well...
10th Jun 2021 10:02 pm
The 2021 Forward prize shortlists for best collection, best first collection and best single poem are announced today. The collections in the running ...
8th Jun 2021 12:00 am
Poems by 16 LGBTQ poets are to be released on an album, We Will Keep On, in response to a documentary called Disarm Hate about the Orlando massacre at...
7th Jun 2021 12:00 am
The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh are holding a reception “to celebrate contemporary British poetry” on Tuesday 19 November at 6pm – and, not surpr...
14th Jun 2021 11:22 am
Heather Moulson is a popular and entertaining open-mic poetry performer. However, she is still a relative newcomer to poetry – and always keen to lear...
1st Jun 2021 6:05 pm
I heard Yona Harvey say in an interview that this loose Shakespearean (“the bard”) sonnet was written for her teenage daughter, which makes its...
15th Jun 2021 1:37 pm
I have no truck with folk who deem poetry about terrible events ‘tragedy porn’. I’ve long held the opinion that poets are cultural historians, and tha...
3rd Jun 2021 1:34 pm
This is a brave collection that revisits the seven stages of women’s lives from the angles of displacement and personal trauma and from an LGBT perspe...
16th Jun 2021 12:00 am
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