The Waste Land App

The full film of Fiona Shaw reading T. S. Eliot‘s The Waste Land is available on The Waste Land App for iPad and iPhone.

In 2022, to mark the centenary of T. S. Eliot’s poem, Faber releases the award-winning The Waste Land app for the first time on iPhone as well as iPad. The Waste Land app for iPad was first released ten years ago to great acclaim. It won awards at FutureBook and International Interaction Design, and achieved international press coverage, including The Times front page. In the poem’s centenary year, the app has been redesigned for use on iPhones, as well as updated for the latest generation of iPads, and is now available on the App Store.

The app brings to life the most revolutionary poem of the last hundred years for a 21st Century audience. It offers a wealth of features to discover the poem, including interactive notes, facsimile pages and readings synchronised to the text by Eliot himself, as well as Ted Hughes, Viggo Mortensen and others. The app also hosts a remarkable specially filmed video performance of the entire poem by Fiona Shaw, directed by Adam Low. Readers can watch over 35 expert video perspectives on the poem, including contributions from Seamus Heaney and Jeanette Winterson.

Reproductions of pages from the original manuscript illuminate how the poem took shape via handwritten editorial notes from Ezra Pound. The release of the app is part of a full programme at Faber to celebrate The Waste Land’s centenary year.