The conclusion of The Letters of Sylvia Plath project after the better part of a decade is bittersweet. For so long, searching for letters, transcribing, proofing and annotating has been a significant part of my life. Upon the publication of the first volume of Plath’s letters last year, I wrote a short blog piece on…
Latest
The Great Comic Literary Conquistador
Edna O’Brien pays tribute to her friend and fellow writer Philip Roth. In her poem, ‘One need not be a chamber to be haunted’, Emily Dickinson wrote of the mind’s many niches and the spectral encounters of night. I have been thinking of the forbidding rooms of Philip Roth, a man so studiously private in…
Anna Burns wins the 50th Man Booker Prize with Milkman
Milkman by Anna Burns has been named winner of the 2018 Man Booker Prize for Fiction – becoming the first author from Northern Ireland to take the award. In this unnamed city, to be interesting is dangerous. Middle sister, our protagonist, is busy attempting to keep her mother from discovering her maybe-boyfriend and to keep everyone in…
Read an extract of The Man Booker Prize winner – Milkman
Anna Burns’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel, Milkman, is a powerful fictional tale set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. The story is told through the voice of a teenage girl known only as middle sister, who is coming of age in the most arduous of circumstances. She is doing her best to negotiate the burdening…
Bake Off with Gordon Burn
By Lee Brackstone Gordon Burn is not a hard person to talk about, or make sense of, in the world we find ourselves in nine years after his death. He comes up often in my engagement on social media; a ghostly afterlife that may have fascinated someone who was so engaged with how the media…
Poetry for a Change: National Poetry Day 2018
For National Poetry Day 2018, we asked some Faber poets and staff for their poetic recommendations around this year’s theme Poetry for a Change. Rachael Allen, poet All Hallows by Louise Glück is one of my favourite poems. It feels to me both implicitly and explicitly to be dealing with change (as lots of poems do) in…
6 pairs of Golden Tickets to be won to see a recording of QI!
To celebrate the forthcoming publication of the latest – and biggest – QI Fact book, 2,024 QI Facts to Stop You in Your Tracks, we are offering six lucky pairs of people the chance to see a recording of an episode of the next series of QI being recorded at a studio in London. To…
