The National Poetry Competition In 1978, the Poetry Society and the BBC launched the National Poetry Competition. Several of the poets featured in this section were winners in the years that ...

A Diversity of Voices In the 1960s the BBC’s poetry programming opened itself up to the world. In the following decade, it discovered a far greater diversity of voices within the UK itself ...

The New School In 1950, the British literary magazine Nine asked its readers whether ‘the BBC and the literary periodicals are carrying out their responsibilities to poetry’. The readers replied ...

A Different Kind of War The war renewed debate about poetry in public life. In 1941, the weekly BBC magazine The Listener asked Robert Graves (‘as a war poet’) to explain why the war had produced ...

Modern Poetry and the Pylon Poets In 1936 W.B. Yeats was invited by the BBC to give its 18th National Lecture, on the subject of ‘Modern Poetry’. During the broadcast he confessed that he ...

A Departure from Convention The BBC began the new decade with a new format for poetry programmes. ‘The Living Poet’, which ran until the early 1990s, would feature a single poet ...

The Early Years We sometimes imagine, looking back, that change happens overnight. The BBC’s first Director-General John Reith, predicted that ‘broadcasting is a development with which the future ...

Year One of a New Era The year that the BBC was founded was also a famous year for modern literature, seeing the publication of Joyce’s Ulysses and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Both ...

Richard Berengarten    Distinctions, etc.  1961 ― The Transatlantic Review, prize in national short story competition  1962 ― Co-founded Oxbridge student magazine Carcanet   1969 ― Arts Council ...

To celebrate Pride and the publication of 100 Queer Poems, edited by Andrew McMillan and Mary Jean Chan, ‘Speak its name’ is a collection of contemporary and twentieth-century voices by queer ...