‘But I’m in love with everything amiss’

The second episode of two very special events features our Contains Strong Language poets on the same bill for the first time. This, the second of two much-loved Poetry Galas, features Jackie Kay, Pau...

Elizabeth Alker invites poet Helen Mort to pick a track that transports her.

Anita Rani and Nuala McGovern from the Montgomery Theatre in front of a live audience.

YouTube video by Greatest Hits Radio News

'She looks like the real thing'

Online Workshop: Writing Poems with Helen Mort – Zoom, Tue 9 Jun 2026 - Writing Poems Join expert poetry tutor Helen Mort as she helps you put pen to paper in a 90 minute workshop filled with inspirin...

Sometimes finding inspiration isn’t the biggest challenge: it’s moulding your poems into the best shape, the best form, the best sequence or collection once you have the raw material. What makes a gre...

What hides inside things we do not know how to listen to?

Heron as grumpy old man

New poetry on A Time and a Place

'Euripides said "better a serpent than a stepmother." For a moment, you like the idea of being a single line, winding around everything you touch. A vine.' 'Brave, graceful and absolutely vital' SARA...

I had a friend who was heron. The river claimed him for good.

A Friday poem

On lighthouses

Helen Mort explores the allure of the lighthouse as their sweeping beams are modernised.

Elizabeth Alker invites poet Helen Mort to pick a track that transports her

Online poetry workshops designed to make you think, bring you joy, make you a better reader and writer AND fit in with your busy schedule.

Online poetry workshops designed to make you think, bring you joy, make you a better reader and writer AND fit in with your busy schedule.

I'm letting you inside my notebook

'The kids were busy getting on with things, / Playing the games that count for everything.'

Rachel Bower is an award-winning author and poet from Bradford. Her debut novel, It Comes from the River, and third poetry collection, Bee, have both been published in 2025.

With the sad news of the passing of Tony Harrison, who as a working class poet had a great impact on me during my formative years of writing in the 1980s, I went back to a piece I was commissioned to write for an OUP collection of essays on his writing - both poetic and dramatic - in 1997. The book, …

Baked the day she suddenly dropped dead we chew it slowly that last apple pie. Shocked into sleeplessness you’re scared of bed. We never could talk much, and now don’t try. You’re like book ends, the ...

On becoming 40

Join us for the much-anticipated return of this exploratory events series which invites writers to speak on topics of their own choosing. Whether it's rese

A day of talks, readings, and discussions exploring how writing about place connects to today's big issues, from climate change to migration

How charming - to exist where nothing seeks / to kill us

In the ‘middle of life’ Lavinia reviews her frustrations, her solitariness, the grief and the rapture, her seeming companions in a pageant presided over, as it were, by the masks of Owl, for winter, a...

Secret audience, silence & John Berger on surveillance

Another peek inside my notebook

On being wrong

On being wrong

Poetry & rewilding, animism & the erotic

Fairytales and time: another peek inside my notebook

Reading, Manchester Poetry Library