From one teacher to another
Science fiction is often perceived as a man’s genre; people think of “nerds” in box rooms writing stories about 1950s-style lantern-jawed heroes fighting space battles and making it with alien babes. The reason for this cliché escapes me — particularly as the science fiction I love best is written by women. (more…)
The poetic arts have never been healthier, declares the Cheltenham Festival’s Guest Director in charge of poetry (more…)
Celebrating a year of fine collections (more…)
Six people have already responded to Ian Bailey’s request for financial assistance to publish his first book of poetry, contributing €800. Four remained anonymous. The “journalist and academic lawyer” has taken to FundIt in order to raise €3,000 to pay for the printing of The West Cork Way: A Collection of Poems and Ballads. (more…)
We turn to poetry in times of need, but can it really help? And why doesn’t it sell more copies? (more…)
The legend that Pocahontas, the Native American princess brought to England 400 years ago, planted a mulberry tree that still bears fruit is to be tested by scientists. (more…)
Although he wrote more than 40 books in a career that began in the mid-1970s, Robert Holdstock will probably always be best known as the author of Mythago Wood, a novel in which a patch of primeval English woodland is revealed as a gateway into the human subconscious, and the birthplace of myth. Michael Moorcock called it “the outstanding fantasy book of the 1980s”, and it won the British Science Fiction Award, the World Fantasy Award, and, as La Forêt des Mythagos, was awarded a special Grand Prix de l’imaginaire. (more…)
Out with Alex Rider and in with William Brown. A leading head teacher has vetoed some of the most popular modern children’s fiction for his school library, declaring it “so simplistic, brutal or banal” that it is barely worth reading. (more…)
This manor has links to Henry VIII and a children’s storybook hero (more…)
The writer Aesop, praised by Sophocles, loved by Socrates, admired by Aristotle, has been made into a cocktail. Or at least, the Aesop’s Fable cocktail — pink, natch — is one of the greasy It-cocktails on offer at The Fable, a new fairytale- themed restaurant under an unfairytale-like dirty tramp bridge next to a thundering A road in Holborn. (more…)