Tomorrow poems inspired by Titian by Jo Shapcott, George Szirtes, Seamus Heaney, Simon Armitage, Don Paterson, Carol Ann Duffy and Lavinia Greenlaw will be published on granta.com.
Artwork: Titian, Diana and Callisto, 1556-9
Jo Shapcott reads her poem ‘Callisto’s Song’ and talks to online editor Ted Hodgkinson about what drew her to render Callisto’s tragic transformation, and George Szirtes explains why he was compelled by Actaeon’s wayward gaze.
Tomorrow poems inspired by Titian by Jo Shapcott, George Szirtes, Seamus Heaney, Simon Armitage, Don Paterson, Carol Ann Duffy and Lavinia Greenlaw will be published on granta.com.
Artwork: Titian, Diana and Callisto, 1556-9
‘I alone know a running stream
that is recovery partly and dim sweat
of a day-fever’
A poem by Rowan Evans.
‘Humour is a thread we hang onto. It punctures through the fog of guilt.’
Momtaza Mehri in conversation with Warsan Shire.
‘Something shifted in me that night. A small voice in my head said, maybe you can make a way for yourself as a poet here, too.’
Mary Jean Chan in conversation with Andrew McMillan.
‘There was to be an exhibition. There were lots of pictures like his, apparently – of waiters, pastry cooks, valets, bellboys.’
An essay by Jason Allen-Paisant from Granta 159: What Do You See?
‘I have started to see that nothing is itself’
A poem by Jason Allen-Paisant from Granta 154: I’ve Been Away for a While.
Jo Shapcott was born in London. Poems from her three award-winning collections, Electroplating the Baby (1988), Phrase Book (1992) and My Life Asleep (1998) are gathered in a selected poems, Her Book (2000). She has won a number of literary prizes including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Collection, the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the National Poetry Competition (twice). Tender Taxes, her versions of Rilke, was published in 2001. Her most recent collection, Of Mutability, was published in 2010 and won the Costa Book Award. In 2011 Jo Shapcott was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.
More about the author →George Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948 and came to England as a refugee in 1956. He was brought up in London and studied Fine Art in London and Leeds. His poems began appearing in national magazines in 1973 and his first book, The Slant Door, was published in 1979 and won the Faber Memorial prize the following year. Since then he has published several books and won various other prizes including the T S Eliot Prize for Reel in 2005. Having returned to his birthplace, Budapest, for the first time in 1984, he has also worked extensively as a translator of poems, novels, plays and essays and has won various prizes and awards in this sphere. His own work has been translated into numerous languages.
More about the author →‘The beasts of the forest drove me out. / The villagers barred their doors. / The gods turned the page.’
‘How far can one deviate from the accepted pieties before one is kicked out?’
Brandon Taylor on naturalism and the future of fiction.
‘I want the reader to be conscious of reading and not being just drawn into the book and forgetting themselves and forgetting their life.’
Claire-Louise Bennett on her novel Checkout 19.
Guy Gunaratne interviewed Margo Jefferson after the winner of the Rathbones Folio Prize was announced, and they discussed her prize-winning book, Constructing a Nervous System.
‘Grief has a warring logic; it always wants something impossible, something worse and something better.’
An extract from Biography of X by Catherine Lacey.
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