KEY TO IMAGES: 1 Ovoid pebble of grey granite 2 Grey granite with one surface cut and polished 3 Pebble of schist with one surface cut and polished. The laminations are more clearly seen on an uncut surface 4 Flattened ovoid pebble of crystalline limestone [unpolished] 5 Fragment of whitish chert. Its angularities show that…
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Celebrating W. S. Graham
To mark 100 years since the birth of the poet W. S. Graham, here is a selection of images and quotations to celebrate his life and work.
All quotes, unless otherwise stated, are taken from W. S. Graham’s New Selected Poems (Faber & Faber, 2018). Cover image: W. S. Graham, with his painting on glass, in the Old Coastguard Cottage, Gurnard’s Head, 1958. Copyright © the Estate of Michael Seward Snow, 2018.
Read the poem ‘To Alexander Graham’, a poem that W. S. Graham wrote addressed to his father, in full here.
GOLDEN CHILD to be Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime
Claire Adam’s debut novel Golden Child is to be serialized on Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime for two weeks from 25th February. A deeply affecting debut novel set in Trinidad, it follows the lives of a family as they navigate impossible choices about scarcity, loyalty, and love. ‘In Claire’s spare and elegant prose, the remote…
Editorial Director Louisa Joyner on
acquiring Milkman by Anna Burns
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart. He’ll want to know what you done with that money he gave you To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there. You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set, He said, I swear, I can’t bear…
Jay Rayner’s My Last Supper, September 2019
You are about to die. What do you choose as your final meal? Follow Jay Rayner as he embarks on a journey through his life in food and attempts to construct his perfect last supper. In My Last Supper, Jay Rayner sets out to answer the one question he is most frequently asked: ‘What would your…
Faber to publish US comedian Samantha Irby’s We Are Never Meeting in Real Life in January 2019
‘Irby’s essays are by turns eye-wateringly hilarious and down-to-earth and authentic, delivering emotional punches that tell us about what it is to be human. An utterly talented and wickedly funny writer who deserves every success.’ Nikesh Shukla As a writer and performer, Samantha Irby is a force of nature. Irby rose to prominence with her filthy, devastating and hilarious blog bitches gotta…
Faber announces unpublished Sylvia Plath story
Faber will publish ‘Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom’, a previously unpublished story by Sylvia Plath, as part of the landmark Faber Stories series to celebrate the company’s 90th anniversary. ‘Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom’ was written by Plath as an assignment in December 1952, when she was a third-year student at Smith College….
‘The Prophet’ by Ted Hughes
This is the last poem that Ted Hughes was working on before his death in 1998. It is a translation of Pushkin’s ‘The Prophet’. The Prophet Crazed by my soul’s thirst Through a dark land I staggered, And a six-winged seraph Halted me at a crossroads. With fingers of dream He touched my eye-pupils. My…
On Sylvia Plath’s Letters by Peter K. Steinberg
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…
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…
