News

Gemma Green took part in Helen Mort's Autumn online course 'Poetry and the Supernatural' and was given a number of tasks to create poems around the theme of supernatural. With one of the poems she created on the course, Gemma came second in the annual International Plough Prize for the short poem category. Here, we showcase the winning poem and another of Gemma's short pieces.

Siddhartha Bose's debut collection of poems, Kalagora was published by Penned in the Margins in 2010. His play by the same name was performed in Edinburgh in 2011 to critical acclaim. In this play, and in his upcoming workshop with The Poetry School, Siddhartha focuses on the idea of the Megacity: how poets through history have responded to, written about and recreated the endless stimuli of urban living. Here, we talk to him about the definition of a Megacity, his poetry book of the same name and Baudelaire.

Malika Booker is a British writer and multidisciplinary artist of Guyanese and Grenadian Parentage. Her poems have been widely published in anthologies and journals including Wasafiri, The Penguin Anthology of New Black Writing, and Ten New Poets (Bloodaxe, 2010). Her CV is a flurrey of writerly activity, and we're lucky enough to have her teaching for us in the Spring Term on a course 'Mapping Poetries', the idea for which actually came out of a Poetry School workshop that Malika took as a student. Here, she talks to us about 'Malika's Kitchen', geographical hybrids and her next collection.

There’s been lots of best of 2011 poetry lists doing the rounds at the moment, so we thought we’d do ours! In no particular order, here are our top ten poetry books published this year and why we love them.