Writing

By Sue Hubbard I have long been interested in the work of Chantal Joffe and have written about her on several occasions. Her figurative paintings...

Alan Trotter is a writer based in Edinburgh. Muscle, his debut novel, was awarded the inaugural Sceptre Prize for a novel in progress. He...

As I leave for Calcutta I think the city Always that other city Its river Ganga Always my other river Howrah Bridge What a colonial cradle A Raj suspended Kipling's imperial joy Hoogly...

Nine miles out from land but clearly visible, Brighton now has its own extensive windfarm. No matter where you live or work, in a strange way, it is always in front of you. Working at full capacity it can serve up enough electricity to light 350,000 homes and has become an established feature of the landscape. [...]

Stone Fruit, Stephen Yenser’s highly anticipated third collection published by Waywiser, dazzles, delights, and enchants with its wordplay, predilection for sound effects, and linguistic...

Last month Megan Girdwood reviewed Sophie Mackintosh’s debut dystopian novel The Water Cure, rendering it uneasy, hypnotic and yet so captivating. We asked Sophie...

Fiona Sampson MBE is a poet and writer, published in thirty-seven languages, who has received international prizes in the US, India, Macedonia and Bosnia....

Max Beaverbrook: Not Quite a Gentleman By Charles Williams Biteback Publishing, £25 In the age of the internet it is easy to forget the immense influence that...

The Crypt on the Green in Clerkenwell Close was beautifully lit with fairy lights, and the low chatter of poetry enthusiasts graced the air....

Philip Larkin (1922-1985) was a prolific poet and writer of essays, criticism and reviews during the twentieth century. Described as ‘England’s other Poet Laureate’,...

I liked not liking you much. I liked playing safe. Not being bowled over by you was part of the thrill. At the King’s Palace Hotel you couldn’t...

Poetry London’s summer launch opened with an impassioned speech by the poet Karen McCarthy Wood, who is a trustee on the magazine’s board. The...

It was ironic, she thought. Her first shift at the museum was understaffed, it was just the two of them in ceramics. He was dark-lashed, very slight – given more to edges than the centre of things [...]

Following on from his brilliant attack on intellectual conservatism in 2016's Pretentiousness: Why It Matters, Dan Fox's new long-form essay Limbo finds the frieze editor all...

Author George Salis has just published his first novel with River Boat Books. Sea Above, Sun Below is described as containing the following elements: ‘Upside-down lightning, a group of uncouth skydivers, resurrections, a mother's body overtaken by a garden, aquatic telepathy, and a peeling snake-priest’. Read on to get a taste of this oneiric world [...]

The word necklace was intricate, beautiful. When she put it on it felt light, beautiful, as if she were wearing coral, or air. The word...

September 1, 1939: A Biography of a Poem, Ian Sansom, Harper Collins Publishers, 2019, 352 pp, £16.99 (hardback) W.H. Auden’s image in the popular imagination...

'No-one has ever written a poem “On His Deafness”'; (David Lodge, Deaf Sentence). - - - - - - - - - - - - - -...

British painter From the 12th of November, BP Portrait Award 2018 nominee Phoebe Dickinson will unveil her new exhibition "Journey Through Landscape", a new...

Fairview is an innocuous title for a play. It has the ring of a sleepy American backwater, a kind of every-town. The curtain comes up and we are faced with the ground floor of a suburban house. The walls are orchid pink, the dining chairs gleaming white and, in the centre of the stage, Beverly (Nicola Hughes) is peeling carrots. She lip-synchs and dances along to the song playing on the radio, then adjusts her makeup in front of an imaginary mirror hanging on the fourth wall [...]

'Cheerily, then, as one making teatime conversation, she asked “do you yourself ever think of suicide?” Lucy pondered this. “No more than is customary,...

In a recent interview with The Times, acclaimed theatre director Robin Icke said that he walks out of shows at the interval ‘all the...

In a large country house enclosed by a gold-gated garden, three young governesses are responsible for the education and general well-being of a group...

Chun Kwang Young’s work mixes the traditional, through the use of customary Korean mulberry paper known as hanji paper, with contemporary style, as the...