In the first of today’s two National Poetry Day posts I want to tell you about a new poetry prize, announced today. It’s for a first collection, in memory of my friend, the fine Irish poet Michael Murphy. If you’d like to read one of Michael’s poems, there’s one in the post that I wrote shortly after his death. Below is the press release about the prize, which has been set up by friends of Michael and is being run by the English Association. The Michael Murphy Memorial Prize To celebrate National Poetry Day, the English Association announces the inauguration of a new biennial prize of £500 for a distinctive first volume of poetry in English published in Britain or Ireland, in the first instance…

Summer’s in retreat but I still managed to spend most of  my last Nottingham Sunday afternoon in the allotment, reading Stanley Middleton’s final novel A Cautious Approach. Meticulously edited by Philip Davis, it brings to an end the 45 novel career of my old friend. Odd, for the first time, not to be able to discuss it with him afterwards. But odder still that, for 13 years, I was able to talk about novels with a writer 40 years my senior, one who I read with huge admiration before I’d begun to seriously write myself. The new novel is beautifully written and, as so often with Stanley’s novels, contains unexpected scenes that shift your perceptions of the characters. Like nearly all of his novels, it’s…

Nice to find myself (under my Twitter handle, Canfan) quoted in full on page 17 of today’s Guardian Review digest of the reader comments about the Booker longlist. For anyone interested who can’t be bothered to trawl through the long or short version, here’s what I said. ‘The Mitchell is brilliant, I think, and would be a worthy winner, but I agree with Joe Thomas: McGregor’s Even The Dogs is an outstanding read, formally audacious and stunningly written. Did Bloomsbury nominate it? If so, perhaps the bleak subject matter put the panel off. I read it in one sitting.’ (The Guardian retained my misspelling of Jon’s surname, which I added an ‘a’ to.’ Oops.)

A couple of years ago, the cartoonist Brick and I came up with a two page comic strip for the magazine Tripod. It’s about the nature of comics and graphic novels and has since been reprinted elsewhere in part and full. I’ve used it in my own university teaching. Now we’ve decided to make it available for free. You can find it on the downloads page of this site (or read online here). As an added bonus, above is a key to one of the panels that Brick did for English Drama Media magazine, while below is part of an introduction that I wrote for that reprint. Enjoy. There’s an old saw saying that ‘if Shakespeare was alive today, he’d be writing soap operas’. What…