CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Winning hearts and minds beats a corporate gong any day
21st century poetry with Andy Croft
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
HAVE you ever noticed how the word “poet” is increasingly accompanied by the automatic prefix “award-winning”?
National Poetry Day — when a panel of award-winning poets give an award to an award-winning poet — is no longer a celebration of poetry but of the PR machinery of corporate publishers.
As poet and publisher Michael Schmidt has argued: “Poetry prizes are now the vehicle of literary reception. Control the prizes and you control the culture of reception.”
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