A NEWLY FOUND POEM BY TED HUGHES

Last Sunday I heard about "Last Letter" for the first time. Browsing through the Internet for a while, I realise that the discovery of this unpublished poem by Ted Hughes has been a media event in the literary circles of the English speaking world, especially in the UK. The dramatic relationship of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath together with the charm of their two somehow dark and powerful personalities, some aspects of their lives and the quality of their works have the power to make a poem worth reading by many people who otherwise are not too fond of poetry.

HOWARD JACOBSON WINS THE BOOKER PRIZE

Howard Jacobson is the winner of this year’s Man Booker Prize for Fiction for The Finkler Question.
The Finkler Question is a novel about love, loss and male friendship, and explores what it means to be Jewish today.
Said to have ‘some of the wittiest, most poignant and sharply intelligent comic prose in the English language', The Finkler Question has been described as ‘wonderful' and ‘richly satisfying' and as a novel of ‘full of wit, warmth, intelligence, human feeling and understanding'.
Sir Andrew Motion, Chair of the judges, made the announcement yesterday, 12th of October, from the awards dinner at London's Guildhall.

Andrew Motion comments "The Finkler Question is a marvellous book: very funny, of course, but also very clever, very sad and very subtle. It is all that it seems to be and much more than it seems to be. A completely worthy winner of this great prize.'
Howard Jacobson has been longlisted twice for the prize, in 2006 for Kalooki Nights and in 2002 for Who's Sorry Now, but has never before been shortlisted.