Fernando Pessoa in Lisbon. From Fernando Pessoa, Obra Poética, Vol. I, Photographer unknown. LISBON NOTES Between 1888 and 1935, the photographs of Fernando Pessoa follow one another and do not resemble one another. Few writers have left to posterity so many portraits that have nothing in common but the name. Which one is really…

Artur Skoniecki and Virvoreanu Laurentiu under the Pixabay Content License Diary of Lieutenant-Colonel Ivan Petrov North Ossetia10 January 1944 13:45 The men tell me they have found a foreign spy. I think they are drunk. The two privates who came to me are gibbering bizarrely. One minute they tell me the man is a…

– A ‘story’ by Tina Bexson Prologue She’d been back in the city for four days, photographing his film crew at work. From the Pyramids to Downtown’s delights, and the Nile’s exclusive floating restaurants. So, what if it was the height of summer, pollution at its peak, sweat clouding her vision, dripping into the…

Photograph courtesy of Rachael Boast Rachael Boast (born 1975) is a British poet and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Born in Suffolk, she studied at the University of Wolverhampton before earning an MLitt and PhD from the University of St Andrews. Her debut collection, Sidereal (2011), won both the Forward Prize for Best First…

Photograph courtesy of Maria Heath Maria Heath’s poetry, essays, and autobiographical writing have been published by Torriano Poets, Nirala Publications, Strand International, Lakeview, and George Whitman at Shakespeare and Company. She holds a Masters in Fiction Writing (with Distinction) from Royal Holloway, University of London, and is currently working toward a doctorate in Creative Non-Fiction at King’s College, London. Having grown up in…

Photograph by kind permission of Xavier Bonfill Mary Mulholland is a widely published poet whose work has appeared in magazines like Magma, Poetry News, Under the Radar, Stand, Mslexia, and Aesthetica. She has an MA in Poetry from the Newcastle Poetry School and is the author of two pamphlets, what the sheep taught me and the elimination game. Mulholland founded Red Door Poets…

Detail from Day of Judgment by Michelangelo Wikimedia Commons Roger Murphy is a poet whose work interrogates the gulf between private feeling and public expression, between the enormity of human suffering and the polite silences with which we so often meet it. Born in Dublin in 1955 and raised in England, Murphy’s path has been…

John Greening. Photograph courtesy of the author We are proud to publish the following six poems by John Greening, an English poet, critic, playwright, and teacher whose work is worthy of particular note. Greening has published more than twenty poetry collections, including To the War Poets (2013), The Silence (2019), and The Interpretation of Owls: Selected Poems, 1977–2022 (2023), alongside…

Photograph by Gene Taylor on pexels Or, how it feels to be cancelled by the SNP. by J.W. Wood Edinburgh, January 2009. The pub is packed: you’re reading as one of four up-and-coming poets, all with your first books or pamphlets published in the last eighteen months. You yourself have just had the longest…

Photograph Johnny Ring There are many Andrew Motions. Not only an English poet, novelist, and biographer, who was Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009 but someone who gave much back to the English nation through his work as a founder of the Poetry Archive and President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England. He…