Retranslations are making their way into book covers.
Which version of “The Metamorphosis” or “Crime and Punishment” should you choose? In a particularly well-stocked library or bookshop, you could find many different English translations.
Sonnets still have a reputation for being about the unrequited love of a man for a woman.
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These moving poems are a reminder that on Valentine’s Day, it’s OK to celebrate a broader definition of love.
We need to speak more about how to become the kind of man who can openly show love for others while accepting love from those who care.
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Encouraging men to take the risk of expressing tender feelings for others is part of relying on love as a tool of anti-racist and decolonial education.
Photo of J.M. Coetzee: Laterthanyouthink, via Wikimedia Commons
The fiction of J.M. Coetzee is always formally daring, brave in its social critique and its refusal to play by the rules.
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky – Vasily Perov (1872).
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Dostoevsky’s sudden recovery from his gambling mania is an example of how a chance happening can change everything
Ellis Humphrey Evans, known by his bardic name Hedd Wyn, was killed on the first day of the battle of Passchendaele.
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Bard Hedd Wyn was killed in action in France in 1917.
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Research suggests the act of creative writing can have therapeutic benefits.
Detail from the cover of Peponi, the Kiswahili translation of Tanzanian Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novel Paradise.
Mkuki Na Nyota
Swahili readers who have not encountered Abdulrazak Gurnah’s work in other languages are in for a great treat.
These books had our academics gripped until their final pages.
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Evidence suggests that writing was probably invented in southern Iraq sometime before 3000BC. But what happened next?
Louisa May Alcott took part in a 19th-century literary culture of anonymity and guessing games.
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By disguising her name, Alcott could publish in less prestigious venues without worrying about tarnishing her literary reputation.
A. S. Byatt in 1999.
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In Byatt’s fiction, northern locations become emblems of the climate crisis and of how human actions have detrimental effects on the whole planet.
Bernice Rubens was born in a working class area of Cardiff.
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Bernice Rubens won the 1970 Booker prize for her novel, The Elected Member, and is the only Welsh person to have ever won the prize.
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Irish writers have benefited from structural factors in recent years. However, ask them in person and Irish writers are more likely to highlight impediments to producing work.
Courtesy of the Booker prize
From a longlist of 12, six novels have been shortlisted for the 2023 Booker prize.
Dans cette édition illustrée de La cousine Bette (1948), l'héroïne célibataire a les traits durs, la mine sévère et triste.
Editions Albert Guillot, Paris 1948.
In his collection of stories, “The Human Comedy”, the French 19th-century writer Honoré de Balzac turned the shaming of single women into an art.
Taylor Swift performing her Eras tour.
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Men in the 1700s penned vehement letters about the way women dressed, slut-shaming them as “cork-rumped devils”.
Celebrate Nos Galan Gaeaf with some Welsh gothic fiction.
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These five works of Welsh gothic literature will not only help you explore Wales through the macabre but are likely to give you a good scare too.
Characters in books can teach lessons about addiction.
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This course beckons students to examine how alcoholic beverages are portrayed in books by American authors.
Fitzcarraldo Editions
Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail is a sparse but searing novel that shows how the horrors of the past continue to shape Palestinian life today