Poem Of The Week: Off Duty By Katie Donovan
Off Duty Is my face just right, am I looking as a widow should? I pass the funeral parlour where four weeks ago the ceremony unfurled. Now I’m laughing with the children. The director of the solemn place is lolling out front, sucking on a cigarette.
Shortlist Announced For 2024 CrimeFest Awards
CrimeFest, a European crime writing convention, has announced the shortlists for its annual awards. The awards began 16 years ago when CrimeFest launched in 2008; they honour the best crime books released in the UK in the last year, and feature the hotly-contended Specsavers Debut Crime Novel Award which offers a £1,000 cash prize.
Poem Of The Week: Cargoes By John Masefield (1878-1967)
Cargoes Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir, Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine, With a cargo of ivory, And apes and peacocks, Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine. Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus, Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores, With a cargo of diamonds, Emeralds, amethysts, Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.
Spying Is Lying: The Traitor By Ava Glass
It makes a change to enter the world of spies and spying; fast action, drama and tension with a good old fashioned Russian enemy who needs to be stopped when all efforts to thwart him are, in turn, thwarted by a traitor, at the very heart of British Intelligence.
Blown Apart By The Sun: Strike By Sarah Wimbush
Sarah Wimbush’s alignment with the miners, and their cause, is never less than partisan. In her latest collection of themed poems, as in her wider poetic oeuvre, that sense of affiliation is front and centre, indissolubly bound up with the connective tissue of her South Yorkshire roots.
Bestseller Peter James Joins Special Guest Line Up At The Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival
Harrogate International Festivals has announced Peter James as the final Special Guest for the 2024 Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, the "world’s largest and most prestigious celebration of crime fiction" taking place 18-21 July.
The Value Of Luck: In Conversation With Martin Venning
It was quite a defining moment for Martin Venning. The West Yorkshire author is sitting down to discuss his third novel The Value of Luck and tells me he started writing to stop him getting bored after a serious accident that left him spending six months in hospital.
Poem Of The Week: Home Thoughts, From Abroad By Robert Browning (1812-1889)
Home Thoughts, from Abroad Oh, to be in England Now that April's there, And whoever wakes in England Sees, some morning, unaware, That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf, While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough In England—now! And after April, when May follows, And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!
Review: Stoking The Fire - Oluwale Now
The sheer colour and vitality of Leeds’ annual West Indian Carnival, and of the exponents of cultural identity in all of its dynamism, endorses the patchwork pageant of integration that mostly seems to work in despite.
Flawed Characters:The Party House By Lin Anderson
I had an early holiday, actually - I was house and dog-sitting for friends and picked up two books to put in the suitcase; well, the weather forecast was bleak. Yet again, coincidence hit the spot.
The Miracle Behind The Legend
Group Editor Andrew Palmer delves into The Callas Imprint: A Centennial Biography a new biography of probably one of the most misunderstood opera stars of her day, the incomparable soprano Maria Callas, whose life has been so vividly captured by music critic Sophia Lambton with a cornucopia of never-published personal correspondence. Who was Maria Callas?
Poem Of The Week: Anthem By Kirun Kapur
Anthem Love begins in a country Where oranges weep sweetness And men piss in the street. Your hands are forever binding Black strands in a plait. Your mother’s Childhood friend has steeped Your skin in coconut oil, tucked Her daughter beside you – the night Is a womb, live with twins. Heat’s body presses every body.
Poem Of The Week: Owl By George Macbeth (1932-1992)
Owl Is my favourite. Who flies like a nothing through the night, who-whoing. Is a feather duster in leafy corners ring-a-rosy-ing boles of mice. Twice you hear him call. Who is he looking for? You hear him hoovering over the floor of the wood. O would you be gold rings in the driving skull if you could? Hooded and vulnerable by the winter suns owl looks.
An Extraordinary Life: Three Things About Elsie By Joanna Cannon
But Ronnie Butler is dead! Florence Claybourne lives in an assisted-living home for the elderly and Florence, or Flo to her friends, has fallen. The hours tick by as she lies alone in her flat and thinks about events both in the distant past and the recent. Florence is ‘on probation’.
Poem Of The Week: An Experiment On A Bird In The Air Pump By Ali Lewis
An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump Is a recreation, revised again by Wright, with the lark replaced by a grey cockatiel, witnesses repainted with faces of patrons, and the philosopher borrowed from a study by Frye, so the dim observers, who weren’t there, can’t have seen it open one moonlit wing as the pressure fell as if the last thing it felt was it felt like flying. Ali Lew…
Defying Gravity: Variety Turns By Christopher Arksey
The title of Christopher Arksey’s new pamphlet for Broken Sleep Books gently ironises the elegiac nature of his poems. A backward glance to a life well-lived, Variety Turns extrapolates alternative meanings from the suggestion of a theatrical playbill to describe, instead, the many faces of his subject, his mother, who died in 2016.
What A Tangled Web: Wartime For The Chocolate Girls By Annie Murray
I am a self-professed chocolate and cream queen. Chocolate in all its forms never disappoints but for me, king of the crop has always been Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, with Fruit and Nut as its Consort. That Edward Cadbury’s aim, as articulated in 1953, was to make the Cadbury village of Bourneville ‘a happy place’, comes as no surprise.
Poems And Pressed Flowers: The Botanist By M. W. Craven
I know my faults. I can be greedy. I would rather have no chocolate at all than limit myself to just one square from the bar; give me a good book and I like nothing better than to read at every possible moment, getting acquainted with the characters and immersing myself in the action.
Poem Of The Week: Rolling News Blues By John Cooper Clarke
Rolling News Blues BBC – the daily Guardian - you choose This misery soup is on a loop Rolling news blues There’s nice people doing nice things Most of the time I can’t prove it but you gotta believe me You wouldn’t hear it on the public dime BBC – the daily Guardian - you choose Deep concern could only earn you the Rolling news blues There’s never been a better time to be…
The Aestheticised Obscene: Dirty Books By Barry Reay & Nina Attwood
Barry Reay and Nina Attwood’s compelling enquiry into the murky publishing world of the early to mid-twentieth century uncovers several complex truths regarding motive and reward.
Leeds Lit Fest 2024: 15th – 23rd June
Leeds Lit Fest is back for its 6th year! Festival organisers are delighted by the city’s support they have received over the last 5 years and aim to make this an engaging and inspirational festival filled with all things literary and a whole lot more!
Poem Of The Week: Prayer By George Herbert (1593-1633)
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Prayer Prayer, the church's banquet, Angel's age, God's breath in man returning to his birth, The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage, The Christian plummet sounding heaven and earth; Engine against the Almighty, sinner's tower, Reversèd thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear, The six-days world’ transposing in an hour, A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear; Softness, and peace…
Global Bestsellers And Fan Favourites Celebrated - Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival Reveals Special Guest Authors For 2024
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Harrogate International Festivals has announced the Special Guests for the 2024 Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, the largest and most prestigious celebration of crime fiction".
Apathy Is The Easy Choice: The Seven Skins Of Esther Wilding By Holly Ringland
A black swan falls out of the sky causing Esther Wilding to pull over, as her windscreen shatters. Having witnessed the incident, Tina Turner approaches and wants to help. Confused by this bizarre opening to a novel? I’m not surprised, but things, especially Tina Turner, are not always as they seem. Esther is on her way to her sister’s memorial. Aura walked into the sea a year ago.
Poem Of The Week: Chaudhri Sher Mobarik looks at the loch By Imtiaz Dharker
Chaudhri Sher Mobarik looks at the loch Light shakes out the dishrag sky and scatters the water with sequins. Look, hen! says my father, Loch Lomond! as if it were all his doing, as if he owned it, laird of Lomond, laird of the language.
Two Left Feet: Vicky’s Ditties By Victoria J. Parsons
It is a tribute to Bradford-born author, Vicky Parsons’, tenacity and skill that she should succeed in bringing her story, or more properly the story of her life, into the public gaze.
Poem Of The Week: Sniper By Jon Miller
Sniper In the street, tanks, rubble. Soldiers wear patterns of sand. The village a jigsaw of dust. Children in doorways hold the hands of ghosts. I sight along the muzzle buried in a hole in the air. You are small, distant. The size of a sparrow. Smaller. You have no family. Were never born. You are just a single dot of God. I crouch behind chimneys. Aerials. Satellite dishes.
Longborough Festival Opera The First 30 Years
Richard Bratby has had a busy time. Having chronicled the 50th anniversary of the Academy of Ancient Music, he has turned the first 30 years of the Longborough Festival Opera into a book. It is a beautifully presented volume, as befits this annual summer opera fest.
Review: Dean Rhetoric’s Foundry Songs
Dean Rhetoric’s Foundry Songs is my first foray into dystopian poetry, and this anthology certainly features all the hallmarks of the genre. The poems open inauspiciously, never on a bright spring day with crocuses sprouting. ‘Psalm of Bandages III’ begins: ‘It’s October and the trees are cancerous’, which is about as apocalyptic as it can get.
Blow, Winds, And Crack Your Cheeks: Daniel J. Mooney’s the 14th Storm
The 14th Storm (2023) by Limerick-born author Daniel J. Mooney is an Irish eco dystopia – the first I’ve had the pleasure of reading, though I doubt there are many contenders for the title! It is 2043, and climate change has taken a turn for the worse. Violent storms are a regular feature of life, rendering much of the planet uninhabitable.