Top 10: the TS Eliot Prize shortlist
Each year, the T S Eliot Prize offers poets a chance to win a huge sack of cash, and critics a chance to generalise about trends in poetry. So here goes: long fragmentary narratives are in, love poems are out (though Natalie Diaz unfashionably flies the flag for sensual abandon). Who’ll win the £25,000 prize? If I were judging, it’d be Sasha Dugdale or Shane McCrae. But I’m not, so I’d bet on Diaz, with a side-flutter on Bhanu Kapil.
I’m sore about the omission of Timothy Donnelly’s superb The Problem of the Many, and wouldn’t have minded a bit of light relief (Caroline Bird, say, or Matthew Welton) but otherwise this is a strong and unusually ambitious list. Like last year, and the year before, and the year before that, half the nominees are university dons, but this year the books
The best book cover designs of 2020
Mark Sinclair, senior editor at Unit Editions, shares his favourite ten book covers of the year with us, which have emerged as the book world has buffeted the challenges (and opportunities) presented by the coronavirus pandemic 14/12/2020 8:49 am
During the eight months since the UK declared the first of its nationwide lockdowns, writers have still written, publishers have still published and book designers have continued to produce an ever-varied range of covers for new titles. Yet there’s no denying that, as with pretty much every job in every sector across the country, the worlds of design and publishing have had to change and adapt accordingly throughout most of 2020.