Imtiaz Dharker grew up a ‘Muslim Calvinist’ in a Lahori household in Glasgow, was adopted by India, and married into Wales. She is an accomplished artist and video filmmaker, and is the author of eight poetry collections, including The terrorist at my table (2006), and Over the Moon (2014), which was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award. She received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her poems are on the British GCSE and A Level English syllabus, and she reads with other poets at Poetry Live! events all over the country to more than 35,000 students a year. In 2020, she was appointed Chancellor of Newcastle University. Following the publication of her most recent collection, Shadow Reader (2024), which was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation, poet Benjamin J Larner spoke with Dharker about the relationship between words and images in her work, and casting new light on historical narratives.

A Sunday night, December 2011. I am in Camp Nou, home of FC Barcelona. I have managed to get amongst the socios, the hardcore fans, and am *this* close to the touchline that Lionel Messi is marauding up and down. [...]

The Poem Itself (1960) would be an excellent title for a hard-nosed, uncompromising volume of practical criticism. As a title for a volume of translations of poetry in modern European languages, it is rather bolder. When we meet with translations, [...]

Hala Alyan is a licensed clinical psychologist, professor at New York University, and writer. She is the author of the novel Salt Houses (2017), winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award, and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize. Her latest novel, The Arsonists’ City (2021), was a finalist for the 2022 Aspen Words Literary Prize. She is also the author of four award-winning collections of poetry, including The Twenty-Ninth Year (2019). Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The Academy of American Poets, LitHub, The New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn with her family. Following the release of her latest collection, The Moon That Turns You Back (2024), poet and critic Jennifer Lee Tsai spoke to Alyan about the roles of witness, catharsis, and commemoration in her poetry.

The two historical narratives that Ishion Hutchinson braids together in his book-length poem, School of Instructions, are twin educations, each charged with violence. The older history is of the tens of thousands of West Indian soldiers, all volunteers, who fought [...]

I migrated to the UK at sixteen when my mother – a nurse in the National Health Service – brought the whole family from the Philippines. If Jane Austen’s ‘truth universally acknowledged’ is that a rich man must want a [...]

Jason Allen-Paisant’s Self-Portrait as Othello begins with a hesitation towards the titular comparison: ‘How could I resurrect you to speak, / when your burial is in no ground / that I can pilgrimage to’ (‘Ringing Othello’). Yet, the character of [...]

I can still remember the excitement of holding my first copy of Poetry London. It was the Autumn 2004 issue featuring Peter Redgrove on the cover, which I purchased only weeks after I first moved to the UK. I can [...]