The London Magazine Poetry Prize 2026, judged by poets Isabelle Baafi, Dean Browne and Luke Kennard, is now open. Entries close March 14th.
Review | The Unravelling Tragedy of Untold Lessons by Esmee Wright
‘Tanet is trying to write something that can’t be so immediately defined, somewhere between a true-story narrative – without the exploitative pitfalls of the genre – and a child’s fantasy story with real-world consequences.’
Esmee Wright reviews Untold Lessons by Maddalena Vaglio Tanet.
Review | Looking for Daffodils by Anna de Vivo
‘Both women are potters who haven’t made anything, and both women become disillusioned by the empty promise of an artistic career.’
Anna de Vivo reviews Hannah Regel’s The Last Sane Woman.
Interview | Desire and Displacement in Sulaiman Addonia’s The Seers
‘It made sense to me that the theme of sex centres itself in my books about refugees, because when people flee from wars, they often leave with few belongings and sometimes without their families. So, in exile, surrounded by loneliness and scarcity, their bodies become a focal point.’
Olivia Boyle talks to Sulaiman Addonia.
Archive | Cheap in August by Graham Greene
‘He had everything prepared: a bottle of Old Walker, a bucket of ice, two bottles of soda. Like books, drinks can make a room inhabited. She saw him as a man fighting in his own fashion against the sense of solitude.’
Fiction by Graham Greene.
Interview | Ella Walker on Pasolini and punk
‘I’ve always loved reading. One source of inspiration for me is Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, particularly ‘The Wife of Bath’ prologue. I loved her gruesome language and her humour. She’s a very powerful character.’
Katie Tobin speaks to Ella Walker.
Review | Beyond Constructed Film Sets by Sara Quattrocchi Febles
‘Once he’d take the required photographs, he’d move around the set like an angel. No one would see or notice him. He managed to camouflage himself to capture the perfect moment.’
Sara Quattrocchi Febles on Sergio Strizzi at The Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art.
Archive | America and the Beatles by Ned Rorem
‘The Beatles are good even though everyone knows they’re good, i.e. in spite of those claims of the Under Thirties about their filling a new sociological need like Civil Rights and LSD. Our need for them is neither sociological nor new, but artistic and old, specifically a renewal, a renewal of pleasure.’
Ned Rorem on The Beatles, from 1968.
Interview | Beverley Bie Brahic on Nostalgia and Home by Victoria Modi-Celda
‘One wonderful thing about translation is that the original poem gives you the shape of the beast: ‘all’ the translator has to do is play with the words.’
Victoria Modi-Celda talks to Beverley Bie Brahic.
Archive | A Letter to Vernon Watkins by Dylan Thomas
‘Now I’m almost afraid of all the once-necessary artifices and obscurities, and can’t, for the life or the death of me, get any real liberation, any diffusion or dilution or anything, into the churning bulk of the words.’
A letter from Dylan Thomas to Vernon Watkins.
Fiction | Love: Eight Definitions by Eamon Doggett
‘She did the work during the daytime: dressing him, washing his hair, and giving him his medicine. Most of that time Adrian can’t collate and discern any linearity, nor can he describe with any material details its happenings.’
New fiction by Eamon Doggett.
Review | Grapes of Wrath by Charlie Taylor
‘Experience is one thing, but facing the cold facts of the world’s material processes is something else.’
Charlie Taylor reviews Munir Hachemi’s Living Things.
Fiction | The Writer by Cheryl Follon
‘People on the street in the daytime come with blurred edges, their faces are grey scribbles in the air.’
New fiction by Cheryl Follon.
Interview | Forward Prize for Best Single Poem Written: Vasiliki Albedo and Lisa Kelly
‘I’m moving more towards how a writer frames their work to suggest how it might be received – just as Marcel Duchamp presented readymade objects as art. If you take a piece of found text and call it a poem, it will alter how the reader perceives it.’
The first in our Forward Prizes for Poetry interview series.
Review | Ex on the Beach by Marina Scholtz
‘For a book to be a truly good reissue it should seem outrageous and unjust that it fell out of print in the first place, and Ex-Wife is exactly that.’
Marina Scholtz reviews Ursula Parrott’s Ex-Wife.
Review | In the Eye of the Storm by Callum Tilley
‘It is not displaying tension between styles, but rather the artistic absorption of them.’
Callum Tilley reviews In the Eye of the Storm at the Royal Academy.
Poetry | Tyrant by Meredith MacLeod Davidson
‘Did you know the T-Rex / was quite likely an excellent swimmer? / Its skeletal frame light enough to float.’
New poetry by Meredith MacLeod Davidson.
Essay | Notes on Context by Callum Tilley
‘Entwining deeply personal stories into a tense political context allows for the exploration of the effects of this context at an individual level that, while fictionalised, is also infused with reality.’
Callum Tilley on politics in art.
Interview | John Barnie on Welsh Identity, Dystopian Verse and the Anthropocene
‘When you are writing you are immersed in the moment. All that matters is the poem.’
Rose Brookfield speaks to John Barnie.
Interview | Eline Arbo on staging Annie Ernaux’s The Years
‘But still, it has this core of universality because it is written in the collective form. We can project our own lives into her stories because she allows us to do so. She invites us in with this ‘we’.’
Eline Arbo on staging The Years, at the Almeida Theatre from 27 July.
Fiction | Flamboyant by Patrick Cash
‘He wondered if it became, at some point, too late to reclaim who you want to be. Maybe some people are just Frankenstein’s personalities, stitched together through the limbs of borrowed traits.’
New fiction by Patrick Cash.
Essay | Izabela the Valiant: The Story of an Indomitable Polish Princess by Adam Zamoyski
‘The joy of taking on a subject not previously covered by historians is that one can approach it with an open mind, uncovering and assessing virgin sources like an archaeologist.’
Adam Zamoyski on Izabela Czartoryska.
Interview | ‘Is writing about climate change a futile act?’: Daisy Hildyard on The Second Body and Emergency
‘For me, there’s something about fiction and the way meaning is not necessarily on its surface that creates room for a depth; a complexity that I can’t achieve in nonfiction.’
Rose Brookfield speaks to Daisy Hildyard about The Second Body and Emergency.
Guide | London Literature Festival at the Southbank Centre
‘In these turbulent times, the Southbank Centre’s London Literature Festival provides an evermore vital space for democratic discussion and we’re proud to offer a fantastic programme to inspire and nourish the next generation of creators and storytellers.’