Aaron Robertson is a writer, an editor, and a translator of Italian literature. His translation of Igiaba Scego’s Beyond Babylon was short-listed for the 2020 PEN Translation Prize and the National Translation Award, and in 2021 he received a National Endowment for the Arts grant. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, n+1, The Point, and Literary Hub, among other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Aaron Robertson

Aaron Shapiro

Aaron T Beck

Aaron Vallance

Aaron Young was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, and read Politics and Communications at The University of Liverpool. He is a BAFTA-nominated director, producer and executive producer with over 20 years of experience across projects for the BBC, PBS, Channel 4, Channel 5, UKTV, UK Film Council and Arts Council England. A long-time collaborator of acclaimed historian, James Holland, he is the producer and director of the BAFTA-shortlisted BBC titles ‘Battle of Britain: The Real Story’ and, ‘Dam Busters: The Race to Smash the German Dams’, as well as ‘The Battle for Malta’, ‘Normandy ’44: The Battle Beyond D-Day’, the RTS-nominated ‘Imphal &amp; Kohima: Britain’s Greatest Battle.’, and the 3-part series, 'Normandy '44: D-Day and the Battle for France. His most recent credits include 'Hidden Histories of WWII', 'Lost Temples of Cambodia', the RTS-winning ‘Lost Home Movies of Nazi Germany’, and ‘Prue Leith: Journey with My Daughter’. Aaron was named in the inaugural list of BAFTA ‘Brits to Watch.’ He is the co-owner of award-winning film and television production company, Bright Button Productions, and lives with his wife and children in Poundbury, Dorset.

Aaron Young

Aatish Taseer

Abbe Prevost

Abbey Bryant is an NYC-based award-winning illustrator. With her BFA in Children's Book Illustration, her notable illustrated books include Nautilus award winner Hazel Mist, Hypnotist as well as an Enchanted Fairy House Kit with Scholastic's Klutz! 
 
As a queer illustrator, LGBTQ+ themes and stories hold a spot near to her heart. Most days she can be found around the city drawing New Yorkers or sketching trees at the park.

Abbey Bryant

Abbey Clancy is a model, television presenter and the host of chart-topping podcast The Therapy Crouch. She was the runner-up of Britain's Next Top Model in 2006, winner of Strictly Come Dancing in 2013 and went on to present Britain's Next Top Model. Later this year she will host Celebrity Homes on ITV.

Abbey Clancy

Abbie Greaves studied at Cambridge University before working in a literary agency for a number of years. She was inspired to write her first novel, The Silent Treatment, after reading a newspaper article about a boy in Japan who had never seen his parents speak to one another before. 
 
Abbie lives in Brighton with her boyfriend.

Abbie Greaves

Abbie Ross is a British author and psychotherapist. Her first book, Hippy Dinners, a funny and poignant memoir of her bohemian childhood in 1970s North Wales, has been optioned by Baby Cow, who are developing it into an 8-part television series. 
Before turning to writing, Abbie had a successful career as a producer at Aardman Animations, the acclaimed studios behind Wallace &amp; Gromit and the film Chicken Run. 
Today, she divides her time between her thriving psychotherapy practice in Bristol, and her writing, and finds that the two careers complement each other perfectly.

Abbie Ross

Abbie Spallen

Abbie Taylor lives in Dublin. She works as a doctor and has two daughters.

Abbie Taylor

Abby L Yates co-founded the Ghostbusters with Erin Gilbert. Ghosts from Our Past was her first book, now finally back in print.

Abby L Yates

Abby Lee

Abby Rawlinson is an integrative therapist with a private practice based in east London, UK. Her work mixes traditional psychotherapeutic theories with cutting-edge, evidence-based techniques into a style that feels relatable, down-to-earth, and compassionate. Abby regularly contributes to articles, including but not limited to Stylist, Elle, BBC, Harpers Bazaar, Sheerluxe, Women's Health, and Psychologies. She can be found on Instagram @therapywithabby or online at therapywithabby.co.uk

Abby Rawlinson

Abby Wambach is a two-time Olympic gold medallist, FIFA World Cup champion, six-time winner of the U.S. Soccer Athlete of the Year award and one of Time’s Most Influential People. She is a founder of Treat Media, an award-winning media company that makes art for humans who want to stay human. Abby is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Wolfpack and the New York Times bestseller Forward. Named one of the ‘50 Most Powerful People in Podcasting,’ she is co-host of the chart-topping podcast We Can Do Hard Things, which has received over a half billion plays. Abby is an executive producer of the Sundance award-winning film Come See Me in the Good Light, part owner of the NWSL’s Angel City Football Club and sits on multiple boards. Her most recent book, We Can Do Hard Things: Answers to Life’s 20 Questions, created with Glennon Doyle, Amanda Doyle and Treat Media, is being hailed as ‘the guidebook for being alive.’

Abby Wambach

Abel &amp; Cole’s story starts in 1988 with Keith Abel flogging potatoes door-to-door. ‘Of course potatoes are organic,’ he thought, ‘they’re vegetables’. However, he quickly discovered how unnecessarily complicated our food system had become and, consequently, realised the huge benefits of going organic and never looked back. In fact, Abel &amp; Cole still get veg from the farm where Keith's first organic spuds came from. 
To this day, their priorities remain the same. Now, selling 100% organic produce, Abel &amp; Cole believe that organic farming (a holistic system that encourages biodiversity) is the very best way to go. It protects our countryside and the critters that inhabit it, insists on the very best animal welfare, supports your local community and, frankly, tastes heaps better. Abel &amp; Cole think so anyway.

Abel & Cole Limited

Abhijit Banerjee, winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics, is the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). In 2011, he was named one of Foreign Policy magazine’s top 100 global thinkers. Banerjee served on the U.N. Secretary-General’s High-level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda.

Abhijit V. Banerjee

Abhishek Mukherjee, 30, is a Delhi-based journalist. He holds a bachelor's degree in English literature from Delhi University, a post-graduate diploma in journalism from the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, New Delhi and an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Raipur. He also likes dogs.

Abhishek Mukherjee

Abi Elphinstone grew up in Scotland where she spent most of her childhood running wild across the moors, hiding in tree houses and building dens in the woods. After being coaxed out of her tree house, she studied English at Bristol University and then worked as an English teacher in Africa, Berkshire and London. She is the bestselling and multi-award shortlisted author of RUMBLESTAR (first in The Unmapped Chronicles), SKY SONG &amp; THE DREAMSNATCHER TRILOGY, published by S&amp;S. When she's not writing, Abi volunteers for Beanstalk, speaks in schools and travels the world looking for her next story.

Abi Elphinstone

Abi Falase is a Black British writer and director, reimagining fundamental societal concepts in inventive new worlds. Abi has written and directed a number of plays, including The Village and Rush with the Almedia Theatre, as well as Rift for Immediate Theatre and was shortlisted for the BBC Scriptworks ‘A Thousand Stories’ scriptwriting competition in 2021.

Abi Falase

Abi Titmuss

Abie Longstaff is the eldest of six children and grew up in Australia, Hong Kong and France. She knows all about squabbling, chaos and bossing younger sisters around. So she logically began her career as a barrister. She started writing when her children were born. Her favourite childhood books were Hating Alison Ashley, A Little Princess, Maura's Angel and The Black Stallion and she sneakily reads them again sometimes. Abie lives in Hove with her family.

Abie Longstaff

Abigail Ahern

Abigail Balfe is a queer, auDHD author-illustrator and Emmy award-winning creative based in Brighton. Before writing books full-time, Abigail led digital campaigns for pop stars such as One Direction and Little Mix, and for TV broadcasters including Channel 4 and Netflix. She also performed stand-up comedy and won several small trophies for her onstage humour, which featured life-size illustrations, ridiculous songs, and rambling stories about her family. In 2023, Abigail was named one of the Top 50 Influential Neurodivergent Women in the UK.

Abigail Balfe

Abigail Docherty

Abigail Foster is a Chartered Accountant and founder of Elent Finance, a financial education company designed to demystify the world of finance and empower you to achieve financial wellbeing. 
 
Abigail has worked with leading financial institutions across the UK, including HMRC, the Bank of England and Downing Street, and global companies such as Google and Goldman Sachs. She hosts a weekly money segment on LBC radio and has also appeared as a finance expert on ITV, Channel 5 and Sky News.

Abigail Foster

Abigail Owen is the #1 New York Times and #1 USA Today bestselling author of 30+ books that range from upper YA (18+) epic romantasy to new adult modern mythic romantasy to super spicy adult paranormal romance. She loves magical worlds with plots that move hot and fast, feisty heroines with sass, heroes with heart, a dash of snark, and oodles of HEAs! Other titles include: wife, mother, Star Wars geek, ex-competitive skydiver, AuDHD, spreadsheet lover, Jeopardy! fanatic, organizational guru, true classic movie buff, linguaphile, wishful world traveler, and chocoholic. Abigail currently resides in Austin, Texas, with her own swoon-worthy hero, their (mostly) angelic teenagers, and an adorable fur baby.

Abigail Owen

Abigail Ulman was born and raised in Melbourne. She has a BA in Creative Arts from the University of Melbourne/VCA and was a recent Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University. This is her first book.

Abigail Ulman

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Jack Kerouac

<a href="https://shop.penguin.co.uk/collections/book-bundles-modern-classics/?&amp;utm_source=Penguin.co.uk&amp;utm_medium=Linked_text&amp;utm_campaign=Penguin_Modern_Classics_Series_26_06">Choose 3 timeless classics for only £21 over on the Penguin Shop</a>

'I want to be considered a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam session on Sunday' 
 
Freewheeling and spontaneous, Mexico City Blues is Jack Kerouac's most significant and emblematic poem. Consisting of 242 loosely linked 'choruses', it takes in life, death, spirituality, jazz improvisation, memory, fantasies and dreams, all infused with the rhythm of the blues, to create a surreal and all-encompassing epic.

Mexico City Blues

Audre Lorde

I have been woman 
for a long time 
beware my smile 
I am treacherous with old magic 
 
Filled with rage and tenderness, Audre Lorde's most acclaimed poetry collection speaks of mothers and children, female strength and vulnerability, renewal and revenge, goddesses and warriors, ancient magic and contemporary America. These are fearless assertions of identity, told with incantatory power.

The Black Unicorn

Nguyen Du

"This manuscript is ancient, priceless, 
bamboo-rolled, perfumed with musty spices. 
Sit comfortably by this good light, that you may learn 
the hard-won lesson that these characters contain." 
 
The Song of Kieu is the greatest classic of Vietnamese literature. It tells the story of the beautiful Vuong Thúy Kieu, who agrees to a financially profitable marriage in order to save her family from ruinous debts, but is tricked into working in a brothel. Her tragic career involves jealous wives, slavery, war, poverty and she becomes a nun twice. There are high points, such as when she teams up with a muscle-bound, tender-hearted rebel hero who makes her his queen and summons all her wrongdoers to account, but the ending is bittersweet. 
 
'To the Vietnamese people themselves, [it] is much more than just a glorious heirloom from their literary past,' says Professor Alexander Woodside of the University of British Columbia. 'It has become a kind of continuing emotional laboratory in which all the great and timeless issues of personal morality and political obligation are tested and resolved.' 
 
'For elegance and sheer readability I doubt if it could be equalled. English readers already familiar with Kieu will be delighted by its musicality. And those who have not previously encountered Kieu will wonder how such a masterpiece could so long have eluded them.' John Keay

The Song of Kieu

A New Lament

Norman Mailer

Advertisements for Myself is a comprehensive collection of the best of Norman Mailer's essays, stories, interviews and journalism from the Forties and Fifties, linked by anarchic and riotous autobiographical commentary. Laying bare the heart of a witty, belligerent and vigorous writer, this manifesto of Mailer's key beliefs contains pieces on his war experiences in the Philippines (the basis for his famous first novel The Naked and the Dead), tributes to fellow novelists William Styron, Saul Bellow, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal and magnificent polemics against pornography, advertising, drugs and politics. Also included is his notorious exposition of the phenomenon of the 'White Negro', the Beat Generation's existentialist hero whose life, like Mailer's, is 'an unchartered journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self'

Advertisements for Myself

Tomas Tranströmer

Over the course of his career, Tomas Tranströmer - a poet who could look on the barren isolation of Sweden's landscapes and seascapes like no other, and find in them something hauntingly transcendent - emerged as one of the 20th century's essential global voices. By the time he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2011, his luminous, almost mystical work had been translated into more than 50 languages. 
 
Gathering his poems from the early, nature-focused work to the later poetry's widening of the scope to take in painting, travel, urban life, and the impositions of technology on the natural world, and stirred throughout by the poet's profound love of music, The Half-Finished Heaven is a unique selection from Tranströmer's work. It is also, in its way, a deeply intimate one: the poems hand-picked here are not only the most beloved, but also those which were translated in the course of Tranströmer's nearly thirty-year correspondence with his close friend and collaborator, the American poet Robert Bly. Few names are more strongly associated with Tranströmer's; and few people have understood not only his poetry, but the processes behind it, more profoundly. The result is perhaps the best English-language introduction to this great and strange poet's work that there could be.

The Half-Finished Heaven

Selected Poems

A new edition of the most widely known and popular collection of Japanese poetry. 
 
The best-loved and most widely read of all Japanese poetry collections, the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu contains 100 short poems on nature, the seasons, travel, and, above all, love. Dating back to the seventh century, these elegant, precisely observed waka poems (the precursor of haiku) express deep emotion through visual images based on a penetrating observation of the natural world. Peter MacMillan's new translation of his prize-winning original conveys even more effectively the beauty and subtlety of this magical collection. 
 
Translated with an introduction and commentary by Peter MacMillan.

One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each

A Treasury of Classical Japanese Verse

'A revelation' Sunday Times, Books of the Year 2018 
 
The first Penguin anthology of Japanese haiku, in vivid new translations by Adam L. Kern. 
 
 Now a global poetry, the haiku was originally a Japanese verse form that flourished from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Although renowned for its brevity, usually running over three lines in seventeen syllables, and by its use of natural imagery to make Zen-like observations about reality, in fact the haiku is much more: it can be erotic, funny, crude and mischievous. Presenting over a thousand exemplars in vivid and engaging translations, this anthology offers an illuminating introduction to this widely celebrated, if misunderstood, art form. 
 
 Adam L. Kern's new translations are accompanied here by the original Japanese and short commentaries on the poems, as well as an introduction and illustrations from the period.

The Penguin Book of Haiku

Richard Stokes

Poetry and music have been associated with each other from the very beginning. The Penguin Book of English Song draws together a great variety of English poetry (including Irish, Scots and Welsh writers) that has reached a wider audience through the magic of music. Richard Stokes's rich anthology of verse stretches from the fourteenth century to the twentieth, collecting poems that have inspired musical settings by one hundred English poets, along with a treasure trove of illuminating notes and marginalia about their lives, work and, often, their approach to music. 
 
Stokes gathers together in a single volume a huge amount of information about English song that will assist musicians in performing these works, and enlighten all those enthusiasts who delight in the fusion of words and music that has produced countless moments of incandescent magic.

The Penguin Book of English Song

Seven Centuries of Poetry from Chaucer to Auden

Gertrude Stein

Sadder than salad. 
 
From apples to artichokes, these glittering, fragmented, painterly portraits of food by the avant-garde pioneer Gertrude Stein are redolent of sex, laughter and the joy of everyday life.

Food

Fernando Pessoa

'But no, she's abstract, is a bird 
Of sound in the air of air soaring, 
And her soul sings unencumbered 
Because the song's what makes her sing.' 
 
Dramatic, lyrical and ranging over four distinct personae, these poems by one of Portugal's greatest poets trace a mind shaken by intense suffering and a tireless search for meaning. 
 
Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

I Have More Souls Than One

Allen Ginsberg

'Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!-and you, García Lorca, what were you doing by the watermelons?' 
 
Profane and prophetic verses about sex, death, revolution and America by the great icon of Beat poetry. 
 
Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

Television Was a Baby Crawling Toward That Deathchamber

Hesiod

'Stallings's new translation of Hesiod's Works and Days - witty, gritty, and unsettlingly relevant - is not to be missed' TLS, Books of the Year 
 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2019 RUNICMAN AWARD 
 
A new verse translation of one of the foundational ancient Greek works by the award-winning poet A. E. Stallings. 
 
Hesiod was the first self-styled 'poet' in western literature, revered by the ancient Greeks. Ostensibly written to chide and educate his lazy brother, Works and Days tells the story of Pandora's jar and humanity's place in a fallen world. Blending the cosmic and the earthy, and mixing myth, lyrical description, personal asides, astronomy, proverbs and down-to-earth advice on rural tasks and rituals, it is also a hymn to honest toil as man's salvation. This vibrant new verse translation by award-winning poet A. E. Stallings conveys the clarity and unexpected humour of a founding work of classical literature.

Works and Days

A.E. Housman

A Shropshire Lad was first published in 1896 at A. E. Housman's own expense. The collection of lyrical poems became hugely successful following the Second Boer War and World War I, with themes such as nostalgia for one's home and the patriotic celebration of the life of the solider striking a chord with English readers. This collection contains Housman's greatest works, demonstrating the lyrical precision and emotional depth of his writing. It includes 'To an Athlete Dying Young', a lyrical elegy to a life lost at its prime and 'When I was One-and-Twenty', a love poem on the ignorance of youth.

A Shropshire Lad

Christina Rossetti

Goblin Market and Other Poems was Christina Rossetti's first full volume of poetry, published in 1862. The collection received widespread critical praise and established Rossetti as the foremost female poet of her time. Tennyson, Hopkins and Swinburne all admired her work. The title poem 'Goblin Market' is arguably her most famous, a fairy tale entwining themes of sisterhood, temptation and sexuality. This collection also includes 'Up-hill', an allegorical dialogue on life and death and 'Maude Clare', a ballad of a woman scorned.

Goblin Market and Other Poems

John Keats

In the summer of 1820, Keats published this collection, his third and final volume of poetry. A few months earlier, he had started coughing up blood; the following February, he would die of tuberculosis in Rome, aged just twenty-five. This volume contains his greatest work, written in an astonishing burst of creative genius in 1819. It includes 'Lamia', his tale of love and betrayal in ancient Corinth; the haunting medieval romance of 'The Eve of St Agnes'; and his six famous odes, now considered among the most famous verse in the language.

Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes and Other Poems

Walt Whitman

A collectible new Penguin Classics series: stunning, clothbound editions of ten favourite poets, which present each poet's most famous book of verse as it was originally published. Designed by the acclaimed Coralie Bickford-Smith and beautifully set, these slim, A format volumes are the ultimate gift for poetry lovers. 
 
In 1855 Walt Whitman published his first collection of poetry, Leaves of Grass. The volume received great praise from leading Transcendentalist poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. This encouraged what would become a lifelong project as Whitman expanded and rewrote the volume until his death in 1892. Whitman's innovative use of free verse and the quotidian achieved his aim of reaching out to the everyday American. This edition, based on the earliest published version of 1855, features Whitman's most famous poem 'Song of Myself', an American epic inspired by his personal experiences.

Leaves of Grass

William Wordsworth

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Lyrical Ballads (1798) is a landmark collection of poems that marks the beginning of the English Romantic Movement in literature. Co-written by friends William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the collection broke away from traditional poetic form. Of the twenty-three poems, Wordsworth penned works such as 'Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey' and 'The Idiot Boy' that use colloquial speech and take the everyday as their theme. The collection also includes Coleridge's greatest poem 'The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere', a supernatural tale of a sailor's voyage.

Lyrical Ballads

Wilfred Owen

A collectible new Penguin Classics series: stunning, clothbound editions of ten favourite poets, which present each poet's most famous book of verse as it was originally published. Designed by the acclaimed Coralie Bickford-Smith and beautifully set, these slim, A format volumes are the ultimate gift editions for poetry lovers. 
 
Poems is Wilfred Owen's only volume of poetry, first published posthumously in 1920 and edited by his friend and mentor, Siegfried Sassoon. Owen is regarded as one of the best poets of World War I and composed nearly all of his poems in just over a year, between August 1917 and September 1918. Owen was virtually unknown at the time of his death, yet his poetic account of a soldier's experience of war has shaped our impression of the horrors of the Western Front. This collection includes the well-known 'Anthem for Doomed Youth' and 'Dulce et Decorum Est'.

Poems

William Blake

A collectible new Penguin Classics series: beautiful clothbound editions of the most famous verse collections by ten favourite poets. Designed by the acclaimed Coralie Bickford-Smith and attractively set, these slim, A format volumes are the ultimate gift editions for poetry lovers. 
 
Songs of Innocence and Experience is one of the best-loved poetry collections of all time, an innovative and groundbreaking experiment in which Blake intertwined text and image to dazzling effect. The volume, published sometimes as two separate collections, juxtaposes the innocent world of childhood with the corrupt and repressed one of adults, and includes such favourites as 'The Lamb', 'The Chimney Sweeper' and 'The Tyger'.

Songs of Innocence and of Experience

George Herbert

A collectible new Penguin Classics series: stunning, clothbound editions of ten favourite poets, which present each poet's most famous book of verse as it was originally published. Designed by the acclaimed Coralie Bickford-Smith and beautifully set, these slim, A format volumes are the ultimate gift editions for poetry lovers. 
 
On his deathbed George Herbert entrusted the manuscript of The Temple to his friend Nicholas Ferrar, asking him to publish it if he thought it was worthy. Herbert died in 1633 and the collection was published the same year to great acclaim, subsequently becoming one of the best-loved collections in the English language. The Temple is an astounding collection of verse poems: an extended meditation on man's relationship to God that is characterised by Herbert's clarity and directness of style. It includes such favourites as 'The Collar', 'The Pearl' and 'Love', with its beautiful opening lines: 'Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back, / Guilty of dust and sin'.

The Temple

W B Yeats

The Tower was W. B. Yeats's first major collection of poetry as Nobel Laureate after the receiving the Nobel Prize in 1923. It is considered to be one of his most influential collections. The title refers to Thoor Ballylee Castle, a Norman tower that Yeats purchased in 1917 and later restored. The Tower includes some of his greatest and most innovative poems including 'Sailing to Byzantium', a lyrical meditation on man's disillusionment with the physical world; 'Leda and the Swan', a violent and graphic take on the Greek myth of Leda and Zeus and 'Among School Children', a poetic contemplation of life, love and the creative process.

The Tower

Thomas Hardy

A collectible new Penguin Classics series: stunning, clothbound editions of ten favourite poets, which present each poet's most famous book of verse as it was originally published. Designed by the acclaimed Coralie Bickford-Smith and beautifully set, these slim, A format volumes are the ultimate gift editions for poetry lovers. 
 
Wessex Poems was Hardy's first collection of poetry, published after he had turned away from novel writing, disillusioned by the savage reception Jude the Obscure had received. Its publication marked the start of an extraordinary new phase in Hardy's writing career: for the rest of his long life, he would write only poetry. Here are sprightly Dorset ballads, verses set during the Napoleonic Wars, and personal poems reflecting on Hardy's life and loves. Composed throughout Hardy's life and animated by his affection for his beloved Wessex, their publication in 1898 heralded the arrival of a major new poetic voice.

Wessex Poems and Other Verses

Vladimir Nabokov

These masterly poems span the decades of Nabokov's career, from 'Music', written in 1914, to the short, playful 'To Vera', composed in 1974. 'The University Poem', one of Nabokov's major poetic works, is here in English for the first time: an extraordinary autobiographical poem looking back at his time at Cambridge, with its dinners, girls and memories, it is suffused with rich description, wit and verbal dexterity. Included too are the surreally comic 'A Literary Dinner', the enchanting, 'Eve', the wryly humorous 'An Evening of Russian Poetry' and a meditation on the act of creation, 'Tolstoy', as well as verse written on America, lepidoptery, sport, love and Nabokov's Russian homeland.

Collected Poems

Laura Barber

Now in paperback, a wonderful anthology of wedding poems, filled with surprising, curious, unorthodox and charming poems about love and the public commitment to love. 
 
For the many thousands of readers who each year go through the complex mix of thrill and trauma that is the planning of a marriage ceremony, Laura Barber's anthology is the answer to a prayer, with a wonderfully generous and unusual selection of poems suitable for reading out loud, and which celebrate and encapsulate our deepest feelings in all their bewildering diversity. 
 
Including verse by poets ranging from John Keats to Carol Ann Duffy and Walt Whitman to W. H. Auden, as well as many less familiar voices, this anthology offers numerous options for anyone about to read at the wedding of family or friends, or to celebrate their own.

Penguin's Poems for Weddings

Percy Bysshe Shelley

A major new anthology of Percy Bysshe Shelley's work, edited by Jack Donovan and Cian Duffy. 
 
'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: 
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!' 
 
Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the leading English Romantics and is critically regarded among the finest lyric poets in the English language. His major works include the long visionary poems 'Prometheus Unbound' and 'Adonais', an elegy on the death of John Keats. His shorter, classic verses include 'To a Skylark', 'Mont Blanc' and 'Ode to the West Wind'. This important new edition collects his best poetry and prose, revealing how his writings weave together the political, personal, visionary and idealistic. 
 
This Penguin Classics edition includes a fascinating introduction, notes and other materials by leading Shelley scholars, Jack Donovan and Cian Duffy.

Selected Poems and Prose

Roger McGough

Brian Patten

Adrian Henri

Since its first publication in 1967 as Penguin Modern Poets no. 10, The Mersey Sound has become an icon of British poetry. Gathering the early, enormously influential work of Roger McGough, Brian Patten and Adrian Henri (The Liverpool Poets), it went on to sell over half a million copies and to become the bestselling poetry anthology of all time. In the course of subsequent editions, old poems were removed and new poems introduced; but now, in time for its 50th anniversary, this volume introduces the restored original selection into Penguin Modern Classics. With its tales of Northern romance, petrol-pump attendants and bus conductors, these are the poems that first spoke so strongly to the real lives behind Beatlemania and the Mersey Beat.

The Mersey Sound

Restored 50th Anniversary Edition

One of the three seminal works of Japanese literature, this beautiful collection of poems and tales offers an unparalleled insight into ancient Japan. 
 
Along with the Tale of Genji and One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each, The Tales of Ise is considered one of the three most important works of Japanese literature. A poem-tale collection from the early Heian period, it contains many stories of amorous adventures, faithful friendship and travels in exile, framing the exquisite poems at the work's heart. 
 
The Tales of Ise has influenced waka, Noh, tales and diaries since the time it was written, and is still the source of endless inspiration in novels, poetry, manga and cartoons. This volume has been translated by Peter MacMillan and includes a preface by the renowned Japanologist Donald Keene. 
 
'MacMillan's Tales of Ise adds to the treasures of Japanese literature that can now be enjoyed in English translation. It is the most poetic translation of this work to date and establishes MacMillan as an outstanding translator of Japanese poetry' - Donald Keene

The Tales of Ise

Abolqasem Ferdowsi

Dick Davis, "our pre-eminent translator from the Persian" (Washington Post) has revised and expanded his highly-praised translation of Ferdowsi's masterpiece, including more than 100 pages of newly translated text. Davis's elegant combination of prose and verse allows the poetry of the Shanameh to sing its own tales directly, interspersed sparingly with clearly-marked explanations to ease along modern readers. Among the greatest works of world literature, this prodigious narrative, composed by the poet Ferdowsi in the late tenth century, tells the story of pre-Islamic Iran, beginning in the mythic time of creation and continuing forward to the Arab invasion in the seventh century.

Shahnameh

The Persian Book of Kings

Henrik Ibsen

These two masterly and contrasting verse dramas by Ibsen made his reputation as a playwright. The fantastical adventures of the irrepressible Peer Gynt - poet, idler, procrastinator, seducer - draw on Norwegian folklore to conjure up mountains, kidnappings, shipwrecks and trolls in an exuberant celebration of life; while Brand, an unsparing vision of an idealistic priest who lives by his steely faith, explores free will, sacrifice and the self. This volume brings together the poet Geoffrey Hill's acclaimed stage version of Brand with a new poetic rendering of Peer Gynt, published for the first time.

Peer Gynt and Brand

'But I, being poor, have only my dreams; / I have spread my dreams under your feet...' 
 
By turns joyful and despairing, some of the twentieth century's greatest verse on fleeting youth, fervent hopes and futile sacrifice.

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