Glyn Maxwell grew up in Welwyn Garden City, which is where his conversation with Simon Armitage in the shed begins. His mother was in the original stage production of Under Milk Wood, so the young Maxwell was soon staging his own plays in the garden of his parents' house. Simon a ...Show more
Olive Senior
Olive Senior gets the prize as the guest who has travelled the furthest to join Simon Armitage in his writing shed in West Yorkshire. Born in rural Jamaica in Cockpit County, Olive currently lives in Toronto, Canada. At 19 she joined the staff of the Jamaican Gleaner, the main ne ...Show more
As an injured soldier under house arrest, Xavier de Maistre staved off boredom by imagining every step around his drawing room was a step across a country; Virginia Woolf’s writerly wandering around central London to buy a pencil exposed the city's transformation in darkness. Ins ...Show more
This week, AE Stallings, the new Oxford professor of poetry, on the lives of poets; and Ann Kennedy Smith considers the different faces of Cornwall.'Sleeping on islands: A life in poetry', by Andrew Motion'The American poet laureate: A history of US poetry and the state', by Amy ...Show more