CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
PORTERLOO is a direct response to the dreaded return of the Conservatives to power — their modus operandi, their malice, their ideology and their sociopathy.
Contemplating the prospect of 10 or 15 years of conservatism to come I considered emigrating but instead I decided to stay put and write about it.
Seeing veteran Afro-American poet Amiri Baraka — recently deceased — at London’s South Bank Centre in 2010 reading a political haiku called Low Coup blew me away.
RUTH AYLETT recommends that this mixture of memoir, diary and poetry by a young Gazan writer be read as widely as possible
ALAN MORRISON recommends a consummate, heart-warming collection about a working-class upbringing in the industrial north-east
ANDY CROFT rallies poets to the impossible task of speaking truth to a tin-eared politician
DAI O’BRIEN, one of the festival’s DeafZone co-ordinators explains


