Deprived children are being robbed of a lifetime of reading for pleasure, by governments that are “simply blind” to the benefits of loving literature from an early age, according to the author... Read more »
It all started with Brambly Hedge and those exquisite drawings of Mrs Apple’s kitchen at Crabtree Cottage: her shelves overflowing with homemade jams, woven baskets heaped with currants and rosehips, drying herbs... Read more »
“Citizen Darfour went to the House of Commons and presented a brief intended to destroy our institutions and upset the state …”—Le Télégraphe, gazette officielle extraordinaire, 1 September 1822 It is... Read more »
Novelist Chinua Achebe, hailed as the father of African literature, when speaking once of the medium’s complicity in colonialism said: “Literature is not a luxury for us. It is a life and... Read more »
An independent review of libraries in England has found a “lack of recognition” across government and a “lack of awareness” among the general public of what libraries have to offer. The review... Read more »
Haitian sovereignty is everywhere in a 1964 painting by the Haitian painter Pauleus Vital. Born in Jacmel in 1918 and active during the late 1960s through his death in the 1980s, Vital... Read more »
A rare copy of the first issue of The Amazing Spider-Man has sold for more than £1m. The comic, published in March 1963, reached a record-setting $1.38m (£1.1m) at auction. It is... Read more »
In November 1803, in Saint-Domingue, the Armée indigène, or Indigenous Army, defeated Napoléon’s expeditionary troops and founded the world’s first Black nation in the Americas. On the ashes of this former French... Read more »
Jamaican poet Jason Allen-Paisant has won this year’s TS Eliot prize for Self-Portrait As Othello, his collection exploring Black masculinity and immigrant identity. Allen-Paisant was announced as the winner of the £25,000... Read more »