This item is taken from PN Review 289, Volume 52 Number 5, May - June 2026.
News and Notes
J.H. Prynne • Ian Heames reported that this morning (22 April) the death of the poet J.H. Prynne occurred in Cambridge. He had been in Addenbrooke’s hospital for
several days, receiving palliative care. A full notice will follow in PNR 290.
Exodus at Grasset • On 20 April the Bookseller reported that some 230 authors have cancelled their contracts with the French publisher Grasset, following the departure of Grasset’s respected CEO Olivier Nora. They were also unhappy with the conservative billionaire owner Vincent Bolloré, suggesting that he was changing the direction of the business he had acquired.
Nora was head of the Hachette Livre imprint for twenty-six years. He was allegedly forced to resign. Initially 115 authors decided to leave with him but the number soon doubled, Livres Hebdo reported. In an open letter to Agence France-Presse (AFP) and Le Monde, the signatories said Nora’s ‘dismissal is an unacceptable attack on editorial independence and creative freedom’. Grasset was ‘a unique place where authors who rarely agreed on much co-existed peacefully’. No longer. ‘We refuse to be hostages in an ideological war aimed at imposing authoritarianism on culture and the media.’ Le Monde reported that the authors plan a class-action suit to recover their copyright from Grasset. ‘A petition signed by 391 publishers, which is now also an op-ed in the same newspaper, notes that the dismissal comes as the latest survey by the National Book Centre reveals an “alarming decline in reading”. It “shows a seismic shift, where a media and editorial group does not hide its political designs, and openly leads a cultural and ideological war”, the text added. “Diversity of catalogues, plurality of opinion and creation, respect for editorial freedom are essential principles for democracy to endure.”’
Apparently taken aback by the wide-spread response to his action, Bolloré spoke out against ‘a small clique that considers itself above everything and everyone, with members who co-opt and support each other’. He drew attention to Nora’s disappointing financial performance and ‘a sizeable increase’ in his salary. Bolloré’s own return was not specified.
The Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize • The Banipal Trust has spent two decades writing to publishers and encouraging entries into the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation. Now the legacy and the future of the prize is secure. Going forward SOAS takes over the work. In a SOAS press release, Banipal Trust chair Professor Paul Starkey and founding trustee Margaret Obank say, ‘The Trust, the Society of Authors and the family of Saif Ghobash who so generously sponsor the prize and lecture are all confident that in the hands of Professor Wen-Chin Ouyang and her colleagues, the prize will continue to extend its reputation and its wide reach into the world of literary publishers, translators and authors, while celebrating the wonderful diversity of contemporary Arabic literature in English translation.’ Maysoune Ghobash, for the Saif Ghobash family, said: ‘We would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to the Banipal Trust for its stewardship and dedication over the last 20 years. Our father Saif’s memory, and his love for literature are never forgotten... Coming together to celebrate translators and authors feels especially meaningful and keeps alive the values our father held so dear.
The Windham-Campbell Prizes • On Wednesday 8 April the eight 2026 Windham-Campbell Prizes of $175,000 each were announced. Among the poets Karen Solie and Kei Miller were celebrated. One recipient, a novelist, for entirely cogent reasons declined the award, which occasioned universal media disbelief.
Darya Kozyreva • Darya Kozyreva, a twenty-year-old
Russian activist who used nineteenth-century poetry and graffiti to protest against the war in Ukraine, has been released from prison, ending a sentence imposed for ‘repeated discreditation’ of the Russian armed forces. Fewer than one in four Russians approve of the continuing war. Kozyreva was arrested in St Petersburg and jailed in April 2025 after she put up a poster with lines of Ukrainian poetry on a public square and gave an interview to a news outlet that had been banned by the government. During her sentencing hearing, she told the court, ‘Ukraine is a free country’. For this declaration she received a supplementary fine. Journalists who gathered outside Penal Colony No. 3 in Kineshma, 335 km northeast of Moscow, were prevented from filming her release due to ongoing ‘exercises’. Some accounts said that the prison was cordoned off due to a reported bomb threat.
In December 2022 Kozyreva sprayed graffiti on a sculpture of two intertwined hearts outside the Hermitage. The artwork represented the St Petersburg’s links with Mariupol, the Ukrainian city razed by Russian action. In early 2024 she was expelled from the medical faculty of St. Petersburg State University due to her activism.
The David Bellos Translation Prize • The literary agency Janklow & Nesbit UK has launched the David Bellos Translation Prize, a new award dedicated to ‘celebrating outstanding translations of fiction into English and championing global literary voices’.
The prize invites submissions from translators from anywhere in the world. It will recognise ‘an exceptional translation of an excerpt from a novel originally written in any language other than English’. The prize honours the late David Bellos, scholar, translator and Meredith Howland Pyne Professor of French and Comparative
Literature at Princeton University, who died at the end of last year (see ‘News & Notes’, PNR 287).
Bellos’s translations of authors, including Georges Perec and Ismail Kadare, earned numerous accolades, among them the Man Booker International Prize. ‘His scholarship and advocacy shaped contemporary understanding of translation’, the agency said. His final work, a translation of Victor Hugo’s Quatrevingt-treize, will appear with Penguin Classics later this year.
The winning translator will receive £2,000, as well as an offer of representation by a Janklow & Nesbit agent.
Elizabeth Jennings • The year 2026 marks the centenary of the birth of Elizabeth Jennings. The occasion will be celebrated online on Tuesday 14 July, with Rebecca Watts, who edited Jennings’s Selected Poems, and Michael Schmidt as hosts. A number of poets will be performing a selection of Jennings’s poems; the Rylands archivist Jessica Smith will share insights about the rich collection of papers held at the Rylands Library, and the researcher Jane Dowson will talk about her experience of working on Jennings’s original manuscripts in the UK and the United States. It is an occasion to celebrate a writer who remains enormously popular.
X.J. Kennedy • We were sad to learn of the death of the poet X.J. Kennedy in February. He was ninety-six years old. He may predominantly be remembered for his text books, including the widely disseminated Bedford Reader, a staple for many students of modern literature and writing in the United States. His poems hold their own thanks to his formal inventiveness and in the strange tonal dynamics he developed to pursue his themes. Kennedy was always aware of children as important readers, with their different but evolving perspectives, and wanted to induct them into the richness of the cultures he valued.
Born Joseph Charles Kennedy, he chose to be X.J. to avoid confusion with Joseph P. Kennedy, former ambassador to Britain and father of President John F. Kennedy. He began as a poet in the 1960s, his first book – Nude Descending a Staircase: Poems, Songs, a Ballad – appearing in 1961. He continued composing for well over half a century. ‘I write for three separate audiences: children, college students (who use textbooks), and that small band of people who still read poetry,’ he declared.
The Bedford Reader, published early in the 1980s, was widely used by college students. It includes famous speeches (Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I Have a Dream’), stories and poetry. Kennedy’s vision was always rooted in the real even when he experimented in fiction with sci-fi. He enjoyed using rhyme and composed poems which are accessible, the experience quotidian, sometime macabre, the expression clear. He was a thrifty poet, many of the poems being brief and epigrammatic, unillusioned when it came to his contemporary American reality, political and civic.
Kennedy received a number of awards, notably the Poetry Society of America’s Robert Frost Medal for lifetime achievement. He was a university teacher and also poetry editor of the Paris Review. One obituary quoted from a memorable late poem in his selected:
Lorca Discovery • Some poets flicker alive again long after they seem to have vanished. A fragment or a whole poem resurfaces and adds to a vital oeuvre. A short poem by Federico García Lorca – about time and its unpredictable dynamics – resurfaced this spring a full ninety-three years after it was jotted down on the back of a manuscript when he was assembling the Diván del Tamarit, a celebration of the Arab poets of Granada, his home town. The flamenco singer and Lorca enthusiast Miguel Poveda bought the strayed page from a German antiquarian. It was authenticated by a Lorca expert, Pepa Merlo. Three years after its composition, Lorca was murdered, yet it is a poem about returning.
several days, receiving palliative care. A full notice will follow in PNR 290.
Exodus at Grasset • On 20 April the Bookseller reported that some 230 authors have cancelled their contracts with the French publisher Grasset, following the departure of Grasset’s respected CEO Olivier Nora. They were also unhappy with the conservative billionaire owner Vincent Bolloré, suggesting that he was changing the direction of the business he had acquired.
Nora was head of the Hachette Livre imprint for twenty-six years. He was allegedly forced to resign. Initially 115 authors decided to leave with him but the number soon doubled, Livres Hebdo reported. In an open letter to Agence France-Presse (AFP) and Le Monde, the signatories said Nora’s ‘dismissal is an unacceptable attack on editorial independence and creative freedom’. Grasset was ‘a unique place where authors who rarely agreed on much co-existed peacefully’. No longer. ‘We refuse to be hostages in an ideological war aimed at imposing authoritarianism on culture and the media.’ Le Monde reported that the authors plan a class-action suit to recover their copyright from Grasset. ‘A petition signed by 391 publishers, which is now also an op-ed in the same newspaper, notes that the dismissal comes as the latest survey by the National Book Centre reveals an “alarming decline in reading”. It “shows a seismic shift, where a media and editorial group does not hide its political designs, and openly leads a cultural and ideological war”, the text added. “Diversity of catalogues, plurality of opinion and creation, respect for editorial freedom are essential principles for democracy to endure.”’
Apparently taken aback by the wide-spread response to his action, Bolloré spoke out against ‘a small clique that considers itself above everything and everyone, with members who co-opt and support each other’. He drew attention to Nora’s disappointing financial performance and ‘a sizeable increase’ in his salary. Bolloré’s own return was not specified.
The Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize • The Banipal Trust has spent two decades writing to publishers and encouraging entries into the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation. Now the legacy and the future of the prize is secure. Going forward SOAS takes over the work. In a SOAS press release, Banipal Trust chair Professor Paul Starkey and founding trustee Margaret Obank say, ‘The Trust, the Society of Authors and the family of Saif Ghobash who so generously sponsor the prize and lecture are all confident that in the hands of Professor Wen-Chin Ouyang and her colleagues, the prize will continue to extend its reputation and its wide reach into the world of literary publishers, translators and authors, while celebrating the wonderful diversity of contemporary Arabic literature in English translation.’ Maysoune Ghobash, for the Saif Ghobash family, said: ‘We would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to the Banipal Trust for its stewardship and dedication over the last 20 years. Our father Saif’s memory, and his love for literature are never forgotten... Coming together to celebrate translators and authors feels especially meaningful and keeps alive the values our father held so dear.
The Windham-Campbell Prizes • On Wednesday 8 April the eight 2026 Windham-Campbell Prizes of $175,000 each were announced. Among the poets Karen Solie and Kei Miller were celebrated. One recipient, a novelist, for entirely cogent reasons declined the award, which occasioned universal media disbelief.
Darya Kozyreva • Darya Kozyreva, a twenty-year-old
Russian activist who used nineteenth-century poetry and graffiti to protest against the war in Ukraine, has been released from prison, ending a sentence imposed for ‘repeated discreditation’ of the Russian armed forces. Fewer than one in four Russians approve of the continuing war. Kozyreva was arrested in St Petersburg and jailed in April 2025 after she put up a poster with lines of Ukrainian poetry on a public square and gave an interview to a news outlet that had been banned by the government. During her sentencing hearing, she told the court, ‘Ukraine is a free country’. For this declaration she received a supplementary fine. Journalists who gathered outside Penal Colony No. 3 in Kineshma, 335 km northeast of Moscow, were prevented from filming her release due to ongoing ‘exercises’. Some accounts said that the prison was cordoned off due to a reported bomb threat.
In December 2022 Kozyreva sprayed graffiti on a sculpture of two intertwined hearts outside the Hermitage. The artwork represented the St Petersburg’s links with Mariupol, the Ukrainian city razed by Russian action. In early 2024 she was expelled from the medical faculty of St. Petersburg State University due to her activism.
The David Bellos Translation Prize • The literary agency Janklow & Nesbit UK has launched the David Bellos Translation Prize, a new award dedicated to ‘celebrating outstanding translations of fiction into English and championing global literary voices’.
The prize invites submissions from translators from anywhere in the world. It will recognise ‘an exceptional translation of an excerpt from a novel originally written in any language other than English’. The prize honours the late David Bellos, scholar, translator and Meredith Howland Pyne Professor of French and Comparative
Literature at Princeton University, who died at the end of last year (see ‘News & Notes’, PNR 287).
Bellos’s translations of authors, including Georges Perec and Ismail Kadare, earned numerous accolades, among them the Man Booker International Prize. ‘His scholarship and advocacy shaped contemporary understanding of translation’, the agency said. His final work, a translation of Victor Hugo’s Quatrevingt-treize, will appear with Penguin Classics later this year.
The winning translator will receive £2,000, as well as an offer of representation by a Janklow & Nesbit agent.
Elizabeth Jennings • The year 2026 marks the centenary of the birth of Elizabeth Jennings. The occasion will be celebrated online on Tuesday 14 July, with Rebecca Watts, who edited Jennings’s Selected Poems, and Michael Schmidt as hosts. A number of poets will be performing a selection of Jennings’s poems; the Rylands archivist Jessica Smith will share insights about the rich collection of papers held at the Rylands Library, and the researcher Jane Dowson will talk about her experience of working on Jennings’s original manuscripts in the UK and the United States. It is an occasion to celebrate a writer who remains enormously popular.
X.J. Kennedy • We were sad to learn of the death of the poet X.J. Kennedy in February. He was ninety-six years old. He may predominantly be remembered for his text books, including the widely disseminated Bedford Reader, a staple for many students of modern literature and writing in the United States. His poems hold their own thanks to his formal inventiveness and in the strange tonal dynamics he developed to pursue his themes. Kennedy was always aware of children as important readers, with their different but evolving perspectives, and wanted to induct them into the richness of the cultures he valued.
Born Joseph Charles Kennedy, he chose to be X.J. to avoid confusion with Joseph P. Kennedy, former ambassador to Britain and father of President John F. Kennedy. He began as a poet in the 1960s, his first book – Nude Descending a Staircase: Poems, Songs, a Ballad – appearing in 1961. He continued composing for well over half a century. ‘I write for three separate audiences: children, college students (who use textbooks), and that small band of people who still read poetry,’ he declared.
The Bedford Reader, published early in the 1980s, was widely used by college students. It includes famous speeches (Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I Have a Dream’), stories and poetry. Kennedy’s vision was always rooted in the real even when he experimented in fiction with sci-fi. He enjoyed using rhyme and composed poems which are accessible, the experience quotidian, sometime macabre, the expression clear. He was a thrifty poet, many of the poems being brief and epigrammatic, unillusioned when it came to his contemporary American reality, political and civic.
Kennedy received a number of awards, notably the Poetry Society of America’s Robert Frost Medal for lifetime achievement. He was a university teacher and also poetry editor of the Paris Review. One obituary quoted from a memorable late poem in his selected:
Go, slothful book. Just go
Fifty years slopping around the house in your sock-feet
Sucking up to a looking-glass
Rehearsing your face. Why
Don’t you get a job?
Lorca Discovery • Some poets flicker alive again long after they seem to have vanished. A fragment or a whole poem resurfaces and adds to a vital oeuvre. A short poem by Federico García Lorca – about time and its unpredictable dynamics – resurfaced this spring a full ninety-three years after it was jotted down on the back of a manuscript when he was assembling the Diván del Tamarit, a celebration of the Arab poets of Granada, his home town. The flamenco singer and Lorca enthusiast Miguel Poveda bought the strayed page from a German antiquarian. It was authenticated by a Lorca expert, Pepa Merlo. Three years after its composition, Lorca was murdered, yet it is a poem about returning.
It’s the mark of flesh
I left behind, when I set out
So I’d know it was my place
When I came home.
This item is taken from PN Review 289, Volume 52 Number 5, May - June 2026.