My earliest reading memory
When I was five and starting school, I would catch a coach from the Oxfordshire village where I lived. Twice a day I read the little metal plaque screwed to the upholstery, which gave the warning “Mind your head when leaving your seat”.

My favourite book growing up
In the late 1970s my dad had a copy of Phenomena by John Michell. Each page covers something strange, which might or might not be true: showers of fish, stigmata, spontaneous human combustion. I would lie on the carpet flicking through the pages and loving the chills it gave me that (maybe) there could be such weirdness in the world.

The book that changed me as a teenager
When I was 14, I was Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard in a school production of Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas. It was when we were reading those mellifluous words aloud that I first understood that writing could make me feel everything.

The book that changed my mind
Learning to Love You More by Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher. The book is a list of assignments: some very simple (take a picture of under your bed), and others more challenging (have a one-person demonstration). The public assignments terrified me, but I discovered that I loved having done them and I’ve been searching out that feeling ever since.

The book that made me want to be a writer
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. It was the first book I read through a writer’s eyes, trying to work out how Jackson created the extraordinary Merricat and how she made me feel so much for her.

The author I came back to
I read Angels by Denis Johnson about 15 years ago and thought, “what’s all the fuss?” And then I read Train Dreams and then Jesus’ Son, and now his books are among my favourites ever.

The book I reread
There’s only one book I keep on my desk while I’m writing: Wildlife by Richard Ford. I often pick it up and read a page or two to remind myself what it is I’m supposed to be doing.

The book I could never read again
Last year I read and loved Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry but I’d never read it again because it’s 843 pages and there are too many other books I want to read.

The book I discovered later in life
I missed out on nearly all the classics when I was younger so last year I decided to read one a year, starting with Pride and Prejudice. And yes, I rather enjoyed it.

The book I am currently reading
I run a book club at the Cabinet Rooms in Winchester. And as well as our regular monthly choices, I’ve selected The Stand by Stephen King to read over the course of a year. I cannot wait to pick it up again.

skip past newsletter promotion

---

after newsletter promotion

My comfort read
I have a comfort author: Elizabeth Strout. I love her writing, her stories, her characters. I’ve just finished her latest, The Things We Never Say, and it was a delight.

A debut poetry collection with themes including race, addiction and womanhood has won this year’s Swansea University Dylan Thomas prize.

American poet Sasha Debevec-McKenney took home the £20,000 prize – awarded to writers aged 39 or under in honour of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who died at that age – for her debut collection Joy Is My Middle Name. She was announced as the winner at a ceremony in Swansea, Thomas’s birthplace.

The collection, chosen in a unanimous decision by judges, is “an exuberant, blistering collection full of life, humour and ideas. Debevec-McKenney is a ferociously gifted talent,” said Irenosen Okojie, chair of judges. “The book is remarkable in the way it galvanises the reader with a sense of intimacy that is authentic and a voice that feels like an antidote to our tricky times.”

Sasha Debevec-McKenney was born in Connecticut, and now lives in Georgia, where she is a creative writing fellow at Emory University. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books and the Yale Review.

Joy Is My Middle Name charts the experience of life in one’s twenties and thirties, dealing with themes of race, sex, womanhood, addiction and consumerism. It is among the first poetry collections to be published by indie press Fitzcarraldo.

In a review for the Guardian, Fiona Sampson described Debevec-McKenney’s collection as “fast and furious”: “These are smash-and-grab raids on a North American life of creative writing programmes and ‘people … at the farmers’ market being very specific / about their mushroom selection’; of cold chicken wings for breakfast and statues to racist presidents.” She called the poems “sexy and exciting … but, as this brainy poet grapples middle-class mores to the ground, they can also be extremely funny”.

Sampson added that the collection fits Fitzcarraldo’s “modernist and experimental house style in ways that feel refreshing for UK poetry”.

In an interview with Literary Hub last year, Debevec-McKenney described her poems as read mostly by “crazy, chaotic girls like me”. “Anyone can read my poems, I hope, but everything I’m revealing about myself in my poems, all the embarrassing stories I’m telling, all the bad stuff I’ve done, I know other girls have felt the same way,” she said. “I’ve been desperate for love and affection. I’ve hated my body. I’ve experienced profound female friendship. I’ve thrown myself at people who don’t want me. I’m happy to admit it all if other girls can relate.”

The other titles shortlisted for this year’s prize were To Rest Our Minds and Bodies by Harriet Armstrong; We Pretty Pieces of Flesh by Colwill Brown; Under the Blue by Suzannah V Evans; Open, Heaven by Seán Hewitt and Borderline Fiction by Derek Owusu.

Joining Okojie on the judging panel were the writers Joe Dunthorne, Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe, Prajwal Parajuly and Eley Williams.

Last year’s prize was awarded to Palestinian writer Yasmin Zaher for her novel The Coin, and previous winners include Caleb Azumah Nelson, Arinze Ifeakandu, Patricia Lockwood, Max Porter, Raven Leilani, Bryan Washington, Fiona McFarlane and Kayo Chingonyi.

My earliest reading memory
I only realised how well I knew the Alfie stories by Shirley Hughes when I started reading them to my own children. Every time we read one now, I’m suddenly back in my attic room in Swansea 40 years ago, watching my dad turn the same pages.

My favourite book growing up
At 10 years old, I read only Terry Pratchett. As far as I was concerned, there were no other authors. I loved everything he wrote but my favourite was Mort, where the eponymous protagonist is Death’s young apprentice. He learns the skills of the trade: traipsing between appointments, meeting the soon-to-die and reaping their souls. I liked how it made the afterlife seem ordinary, even bureaucratic, with the Grim Reaper more like a taxman – unwelcome wherever he goes.

The book that changed me as a teenager
Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy was a set text at school and that alone would normally have been enough to make me suspicious. But something about this book cut through. Tess was the first fictional character I properly believed in. When she died, the pain I felt was real. I didn’t realise books could do that to you.

The writer who changed my mind
When I first started writing a book about my family’s German-Jewish history, my parents – who are historians – kept asking: “Are you sure this is a good idea?” And the truth was I wasn’t sure. In fact it seemed like it might be a terrible idea. It was only when I read HHhH by Laurent Binet that I found a book that gave me permission to approach the subject with both levity and seriousness, to tell the story in my own voice, with the subjectivity intact.

The book that made me want to be a writer
Probably my older sister’s copy of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting when I was 17.

The author I came back to
Growing up in Swansea, I developed an allergy to Dylan Thomas. He was inescapable, an industry to himself. So for a good 20 years or so, I turned against him. And, to be honest, I still don’t get much from his poetry (particularly when he reads it himself in his boom-boom voice). But I’ve recently come to love his short stories, especially the autobiographical stories in Portrait of the Artist As a Young Dog. They feel wonderfully warm and irreverent.

The book I reread
For a long time, I did not reread any books on the principle that it would be wasting an opportunity to discover something new. How wrong I was! The one I keep coming back to is Meadowlands by Louise Glück. The spareness of the language really suits multiple readings. Her poems are often about the shifting perspectives of age so, in a sense, her subject is rereading. As she famously puts it: “We look at the world once, in childhood. / The rest is memory.”

The book I could never read again
When I was 18, a teacher lent me a copy of The Secret History by Donna Tartt. I devoured it; I loved feeling part of this intellectual friendship group where their discussions of Greek philosophy carried undercurrents of sex and danger. It showed university life as I wanted it to be. But returning to the book – after having actually been to university – I felt as if I’d been conned.

The book I discovered later in life
I was late to Marilynne Robinson but then I read Housekeeping and it barrelled straight into my list of all-timers. I will never forget the image of the train derailing on a bridge above a glacial lake and how, “like a weasel sliding off a rock”, it plunges into the deep.

The book I am currently reading
Thomas Bernhard’s deliciously bitter My Prizes, a very short book about the nine times he has been awarded a literary prize and all the small and large ways he has found to be ungrateful about it. It’s shocking and refreshing – the literary equivalent of a cold plunge.

My comfort read
The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith. After my son was born, this was the book my partner and I read to each other in bed during the night feeds. Sitting in the dark at 3am, we wanted nothing more than to escape into Ripley’s world of money, murder and boat trips to Palermo.

Thirty-five thousand years ago, in the Ardèche region of France, Paleolithic artists drew a spectacular bestiary on the walls of the Chauvet cave. Their focus was apex predators, so there were lots of lions, as well as mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses. Dogs were nowhere to be seen, and yet in the soft sediment on the limestone floor of the cave, there are traces of canid pawprints next to human footprints. Two fellow creatures, most likely a boy and a dog, stood together, about 10,000 years after the art was made, looking up at the walls in wonder. Here was a moment of shared contemplation, followed perhaps by a glance to see the other’s reaction.

In this luminous book, the American cultural historian Thomas Laqueur explores what he calls “the dog’s gaze”. The dog was the first animal to live companionably with humans, and Laqueur argues that this marks the boundary between nature and culture. It is this threshold status that has, in turn, qualified the dog to play a rich, symbolic part in western art. Just having dogs in a picture – snuffling for picnic crumbs in Seurat’s La Grande Jatte or trooping home in Bruegel the Elder’s Hunters in the Snow – becomes a way for an artist to pack an image with extra resonance and second-order meaning.

From this starting point Laqueur takes us on a wonderfully illustrated tour of dogs in art, from the shitting cur in Rembrandt’s etching The Good Samaritan to the Jeff Koons balloon dog, by way of cinema superstar Lassie. His special interest, though, is for those places where dogs are engaged in an act of looking. There are two main scenarios. Either the dog is peering deeper into the scene as if to work out what is going on, or else it is turning to look at the viewer, as if to say “are you seeing this?” or even “can you believe it?”

A prime example concerns the sleepy mastiff in the bottom right-hand corner of Velázquez’s Las Meninas, set at the busy Madrid court of Philip IV. In compositional terms the dog’s solid, weighty form provides a grounding for the kerfuffle going on elsewhere: ladies-in-waiting fuss with the Infanta’s dress, the court chamberlain hovers in an open doorway, the king and queen appear in a mirror and Velásquez even paints himself into the picture. The mastiff’s droopy-eyed glance out of the frame and towards the viewer is matter-of-fact and just the right side of cynical. “Don’t worry about all the tricks of perspective that are unfolding above my head”, it seems to be saying, “you and I know which way is up.”

In the cottage industry of scholarly comment that has sprung up around Las Meninas in the last 350 years, the mastiff rarely gets noticed. One person who did see it, though, was Picasso. In 1957 he produced a series of paintings which riff on Velásquez’s masterpiece. In 15 of them the Spanish mastiff has been replaced by Picasso’s beloved dachshund, Lump. Faintly ludicrous, Lump romps through this Cubist universe, always looking out of the frame with what Laqueur calls a “brazen” gaze, as if challenging the viewer to make sense of a scene that does not even pretend to offer any kind of stable meaning.

By the end of this clever, beautiful book, Laqueur has persuasively made his point that the dog’s function in western art is to provide an entry-point or alter ego for viewers who might otherwise feel overwhelmed or outclassed. In Veronese’s spectacular The Wedding Feast at Cana, there are no fewer than six dogs on duty. While the pious ones look on entranced at the miracle unfolding in front of them, there is a little scruff in the corner who is more interested in the scraps that the tipsy guests might allow to fall to the floor. By this generous gesture, Veronese allows the greedy, snuffling viewer to have a place at the sacred scene.

Although the painting was a wild success, Veronese was in for a shock. When, 10 years on, in 1573, he tried to put a dog into his interpretation of the Last Supper, the Inquisition came down on him for blasphemy. Unperturbed, the artist simply changed the title to The Feast in the House of Levi and made sure that the dog stayed in the picture.

Paul Thomas Anderson has won his first Oscar, for best adapted screenplay for One Battle After Another.

Also directed by Anderson, One Battle After Another is a loose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland; it stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a former revolutionary living under a new name with his teenage daughter, played by Chase Infiniti.

Anderson, 55, had to overcome a strong field, including Guillermo del Toro for Frankenstein, Chloé Zhao and Maggie O’Farrell for Hamnet, and Will Tracy for Bugonia.

Anderson has been nominated 14 times previously, including five times for screenplays and three times for best director.

“I’m incredibly honoured to be part of this history,” said Anderson, adding that he owed a “huge debt of of admiration and love” to Pynchon, but that his special thanks went to his family, “the people that you share a roof with, who put up with what it means to live with a writer”.

He then shouted out his wife, Maya Rudolph, as well as “Rain, Sylvia, Goo, Uncle Paul, Jojo”.

He added: “I wrote this movie for my kids, to say sorry for the housekeeping mess that we left in this world we’re handing off to them. But also with the encouragement that they will be the generation that hopefully brings us some common sense and decency.

“My Pearl, Lucy, Jack, and Ida. I love you. Thank you very much.”

The film-maker dominated the awards season in this category, winning best adapted screenplay at the Baftas, Critics Choice and Writers Guild awards, and best screenplay at the Golden Globes.

At the Oscars, Anderson also won the award for best directing for One Battle After Another. The film garnered six prizes in total, including the inaugural casting award and best film.

Derek Owusu and Seán Hewitt are among the writers shortlisted for this year’s Swansea University Dylan Thomas prize.

Harriet Armstrong, Colwill Brown, Sasha Debevec-McKenney and Suzannah V Evans also made the shortlist for the £20,000 award, which celebrates fiction in any form – including novels, short stories, poetry and drama – by writers aged 39 or under, in honour of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who died at that age.

Comprising four novels and two poetry collections, the books on the “galvanising” shortlist “have profound things to say about the ways we live and what it means to be human”, said author and judging panel chair, Irenosen Okojie.

Two of the six shortlisted authors have previously been nominated for the award. British-Irish poet and memoirist Hewitt, nominated in 2025 for his poetry collection, Rapture’s Road, has been chosen again for his debut novel, Open, Heaven – a portrait of gay first love, described in the Guardian by Sarah Perry as a “tender, skilled and epiphanic work”.

Owusu, a 2023 prize nominee, is shortlisted for Borderline Fiction, which follows a young black man navigating a series of relationships and coming to terms with mental health difficulties. Praised in the Guardian as “disarmingly poignant”, it is his third novel.

Armstrong, the youngest shortlisted author at just 25, is in the running with To Rest Our Minds and Bodies, a darkly comic campus novel grappling with gen Z gender relations and mental health, in which Armstrong “expertly adumbrates the emotional intensity and vulnerability of first love”, according to Guardian reviewer Jude Cook.

Brown, too, is recognised for her debut novel, We Pretty Pieces of Flesh, about three working-class girls growing up in Doncaster, set between the late 90s and 2015. Brown’s novel “feels essential … you will probably read nothing else like it this year”, wrote Catherine Taylor in the Guardian.

Both poetry collections on the shortlist come from debut authors: American poet Debevec-McKenney, whose Joy is My Middle Name engages with themes of sex, race, addiction and pop culture; and Bristol-based Evans, whose Under the Blue offers a meditation on the lived realities of care.

The six-strong shortlist was chosen from a longlist of 12, which also featured Chaotic Good by Isabelle Baafi, What Remains After a Fire by Kanza Javed, The Tiny Things Are Heavier by Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo, Absence by Issa Quincy, Gunk by Saba Sams and Make a Home of Me by Vanessa Santos.

Joining Okojie on the judging panel are the writers Joe Dunthorne, Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe, Prajwal Parajuly and Eley Williams.

Last year’s prize was awarded to Palestinian writer Yasmin Zaher for her novel The Coin, and previous winners include Caleb Azumah Nelson, Arinze Ifeakandu, Patricia Lockwood, Max Porter, Raven Leilani, Bryan Washington, Fiona McFarlane and Kayo Chingonyi.

The winner will be announced on 14 May at a ceremony in Swansea, Thomas’s birthplace.

The number of plays attributed to the 16th-century playwright Thomas Kyd has more than doubled in a major new edition.

The forthcoming second volume of The Collected Works of Thomas Kyd makes a substantial case for his sole or part-authorship of plays previously attributed to William Shakespeare or Christopher Marlowe.

Kyd’s traditionally accepted dramas are the revenge play The Spanish Tragedy, the love tragedy Soliman and Perseda, and the classical tragedy Cornelia.

His canon now includes works such as the domestic tragedy Arden of Faversham, which is attributed solely to Kyd and “not at all” to Shakespeare, as others have previously assumed.

In the first critical edition of Kyd’s collected works since 1901, he is presented as a “tragically neglected major playwright”. Its nine scholars argue that the restored oeuvre situates Kyd as a leading Elizabethan dramatist, unjustly overshadowed by his great contemporaries, as well as “broadening our understanding of a golden period of literature and theatre”.

Dr Darren Freebury-Jones, a former academic at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon, is the publication’s associate editor. He told the Guardian: “Kyd’s canon has now been expanded from three plays to eight. In the cases of Arden of Faversham, Fair Em, the Miller’s Daughter of Manchester and parts of Henry VI Part 1 and Edward III, this is the first time they have been presented in a critical, collected play edition as Kyd’s, despite a long history of these plays being associated with him.”

Evidence presented in the new volume includes computational analysis of linguistic minutiae, as well as similarities in plotting and characterisation. It attributes Henry VI Part 1 to Kyd, Thomas Nashe and Shakespeare, but not to Marlowe as was previously assumed.

Freebury-Jones, whose books include Shakespeare’s Borrowed Feathers, a study of early modern authors who inspired Shakespeare, said: “Kyd is quite different from Shakespeare in several respects, particularly in terms of rhyme. He has this curious habit of breaking up his rhyme schemes. So, you’re reading his text, you’re thinking, ‘no, this is not rhyming’. And then a couple of lines later, you have a rhyming word.

“It’s quite different to Shakespeare. Arden of Faversham sits firmly within Kyd’s vocabulary that is quite distinct from Shakespeare’s.”

He added that Arden of Faversham closely corresponds to other Kyd texts in terms of stage directions, for example. “Stage directions beginning ‘Then they’ are unique to Kyd in commercial drama of the period. There are also numerous distinct internal repetitions, such as the exact image of ‘heart’s grief’ and the phrase, ‘fine device’, which feature in Kyd’s plays, but not in the much larger attested corpora of dramatists such as Shakespeare.

“We can broaden our appreciation, as well as understanding of Shakespeare, by comparing his plays to those that were being performed at the same time.”

Prof Sir Brian Vickers of the University of London, the general editor of the Kyd edition, said: “Apart from Shakespeare, Marlowe has enjoyed the most publicity of all the Elizabethan dramatists, although the number of plays that he actually wrote is very small. This is partly the accident of being notorious, because he died in a terrible fight in a tavern in Deptford with a dagger thrust in his eye, which gives you a certain kudos.

“Whereas Kyd – who once shared a room with Marlowe – was a serious writer, who just went about his business as one of the hard-working, conscientious writers who never became notorious. He deserves to have his plays staged today.”

Dream-Pedlary

i.

If there were dreams to sell.
What would you buy?
Some cost a passing bell;
Some a light sigh,
That shakes from Life’s fresh crown
Only a rose-leaf down.
If there were dreams to sell,
Merry and sad to tell,
And the crier rung the bell,
What would you buy?

ii.

A cottage lone and still,
With bowers nigh,
Shadowy, my woes to still,
Until I die.
Such pearl from Life’s fresh crown
Fain would I shake me down.
Were dreams to have at will,
This would best heal my ill,
This would I buy.

iii.

But there were dreams to sell
Ill didst thou buy;
Life is a dream, they tell,
Waking, to die.
Dreaming a dream to prize,
Is wishing ghosts to rise;
And, if I had the spell
To call the buried well
Which one would I?

iv.

If there are ghosts to raise,
What shall I call,
Out of hell’s murky haze,
Heaven’s blue pall?
Raise my loved long-lost boy
To lead me to his joy. –
There are no ghosts to raise;
Out of death lead no ways;
Vain is the call.

v.

Know’st thou not ghosts to sue?
No love thou hast.
Else lie, as I will do,
And breathe thy last.
So out of Life’s fresh crown
Fall like a rose-leaf down.
Thus are the ghosts to woo;
Thus are all dreams made true,
Ever to last!

Dream-Pedlary by the Bristol-born English poet, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, 1803-1849, is the most often anthologised, and arguably most perfect of his lyric poems. It has a music that lifts it immediately from the page, and, although it questions anticipated regularities of scansion, rhyme scheme and form, these minor instabilities in fact contribute to its effectiveness.

The first line, for instance, has various rhythmic possibilities: it works well if scanned as two double dactyls (“If there were dreams to sell”), but also fits the bill as iambic trimeter (“If there were dreams to sell”), or, perhaps most appealingly, a combination: “If there were dreams to sell”. Awareness of that flexibility benefits the reading of the subsequent first lines – the first line of the second stanza, for example, which is rather more effective with the slower movement of three iambs: “A cottage lone and still.”

There’s a further shift, in that the poem seems to begin as a personal, rather whimsical question to the reader (“If there were dreams to sell / What would you buy?”: that suggestion of intimacy certainly helps engage us. But in the second stanza, the speaker answers his own question, and we begin to feel the inwards-turning of his thoughts, sustained until the final stanza, where the “you” and the speaker’s “I” again become separate, or apparently so.

Regarding the rhyme scheme and stanza-form, the first stanza is distinctive in having 10 lines, with lines one and two repeated unchanged, and a little group of triplets that picks up the “A” rhyme: “sell / tell / bell”. That triplet pattern is dropped in the subsequent nine-lined stanzas. Repetition remains important, though: it’s audible throughout, in the three times recurring “crown / down” rhymes, for instance, and the bigger pattern of question-and-answer.

Argument begins to predominate: there had been “dreams to sell” but, the speaker tells himself in stanza three, “ill didst thou buy”. The most urgent question concerns the issue of “ghosts to raise” – a concern born of Beddoes’ practice both in poetry and medicine. His fascination with the gothic in the poems and dramatic writing, Death’s Jest Book in particular, comes from his medical studies, and the serious investigation into post-death spiritual survival. His conclusion that no evidence existed didn’t preclude the poetic argument with mortality.

Beddoes’ search for “a dream to prize” centres on the question of which ghost he would “raise”. He refers to those “buried well”, the adverb hinting that there may be a psychological depth desirable for effective burial. A newly rumoured possibility appears: if “life is a dream”, to die may be to wake to a different level of reality.

The dreamed-of ghost in stanza iv, ”the loved long-lost boy”, is thought to be the Russian medical student, Benjamin Bernhard Reich, with whom Beddoes lived for a year when he himself was studying medicine at Göttingen. The complexity of the poet’s sense of alienation has gained a new dimension from an increasing recognition of his homosexuality. It was integral to the spectrum of his creative and political rebellion, and to his way of life. In continental Europe, he was mostly a wanderer, essentially homeless. In the poem, the earlier dream of the settled dwelling that would “best heal my ill” has particular pathos.

Dream-Pedlary, as it deftly negotiates technical and imaginative integration, shows Beddoes finding his place as a kind of late-Romantic poet: see also his early tribute to Shelley. At the same time, there’s a self-parodic, almost camp consciousness at work: Romantic tropes beget wry questions, delicate metaphors gain fleshly weight. The first-stanza dream (lines five and six) which costs only “a light sigh” rather than the funeral bell, is revised in the fifth stanza, where the “rose-leaf” and “Life’s fresh crown” reappear, differently balanced. The rose-leaf falls less lightly: the certainty larger than the “crown” is the fact of death, and optimistic inferences can only be paradoxical, perhaps made in pure jest: “Thus are the ghosts to woo; / Thus are all dreams made true, / Ever to last!”

In a 1924 letter to André Gide, Thomas Mann said he would soon be sending along a copy of his new novel, The Magic Mountain. “But I assure you that I do not in the least expect you to read it,” he wrote. “It is a highly problematical and ‘German’ work, and of such monstrous dimensions that I know perfectly well it won’t do for the rest of Europe.”

Morten Høi Jensen’s approachable and informative study of The Magic Mountain positions Mann as a writer who was contradictory to his core: an artist who dressed and behaved like a businessman; a homosexual in a conventional marriage with six children; an upstanding burgher obsessed with death and corruption. Very much the kind of man who would send someone a book and tell them not to read it.

Despite the doubts Mann expressed to Gide, The Magic Mountain – a very strange, very long novel – was embraced throughout Europe, and three years later in America, too. Its publisher there ignored the strangeness and proclaimed its “use value … for the practical life of modern man”. While that makes it sound like Jordan Peterson-style cod philosophy, in fact it stands alongside In Search of Lost Time, Ulysses, The Man Without Qualities and To the Lighthouse as one of the summits (apologies) of literary modernism.

The novel describes its youthful protagonist, Hans Castorp, visiting a tuberculosis sanatorium in Davos where his cousin is a patient. Intending to stay a few days, he doesn’t escape for seven years. The novel’s plot mirrored its composition: it was first conceived as a novella, a lighthearted counterpart to the gloomy Death in Venice. But Mann began writing in 1913 and didn’t finish for more than a decade. Between those two points, the first world war radically changed the book’s size, scope and temper because it radically changed the political and moral outlook of its author.

Mann began the war a staunch conservative. Yet by the early 1920s he was making speeches in defence of the maligned Weimar Republic. (In time, and in exile, Mann became the most prominent German opponent of the Third Reich.)

This tumult fed into The Magic Mountain, notably in the characters of Lodovico Settembrini (humanist) and Leo Naphta (rightwing radical), who vie for Castorp’s soul. Their arguments are dazzling – far more so than the political toing and froing Mann engaged in while writing the novel. It isn’t Jensen’s intention, but his dogged account of Mann’s shifting political views supports the theory that a novel can know more than its creator.

Jensen falters occasionally when attempting to correct the record. He says the “oft-repeated claim” that Mann “was an indifferent or cruel parent seems inaccurate”. Yet all he offers in support is a single quote from the autobiography of Thomas’s son Klaus, who was deeply troubled for much of his relatively short life. There is voluminous evidence to the contrary.

Jensen also takes issue with the “callousness” of Ronald Hayman’s assertion, in his 1995 biography, that Mann “liked and admired” his wife but wasn’t in love with her. Hayman supports his claim by quoting from a letter Thomas wrote to his brother on the matter. It’s permissible to takeissue with Hayman’s conclusion, but Jensen’s protest – “How could he possibly know?” – seems disingenuous coming from a writer engaged in the same process of interpretative analysis. Especially in the case of a judgment about Mann (“gay most of the time”, in Colm Tóibín’s description) that is so uncontroversial.

Whatever the truth may be, it doesn’t make The Magic Mountain any less captivating an exploration of the human condition, or less of a literary achievement. Jensen doesn’t penetrate deeply into the mysteries of the book, but he doesn’t aim to do so. Rather, he gives a brisk, confident overview of an extremely dense work of art – no small achievement – and contextualises the era in which it was forged. In his foreword to the novel Mann wrote that “only thoroughness can be truly entertaining”, but summary has its pleasures too.

Tobacco, swiss roll, Irish whiskey, Guinness and monkey nuts: that’s the diet followed by one of the foremost poets of the 20th century.

Dylan Thomas’ grocery bill is among a trove of famous writers’ personal documents and letters – many of which are as yet unseen by the public, and have been exclusively shown to the Guardian – discovered in the case files of a literary charity.

A unpublished note from Sylvia Plath’s doctor and an unseen letter by Nobel prize winner Doris Lessing also feature in the cache of documents, which once formed applications to the Royal Literary Fund (RLF), a charity that awards hardship grants to writers.

Letters from James Joyce, CS Lewis, Joseph Conrad, Mervyn Peake and Edith Nesbit are among those found in the case files, which are stored between the British Library, where they are available to view, and at the RLF offices tucked behind Fleet Street, where discoveries are ongoing as boxes of case files continue to be catalogued.

Many documents show writers at the most vulnerable times of their lives, often in precarious positions early in their careers; everything from feeble book sales to illness to messy marriages to grief is chronicled here. A note from Plath’s doctor about her entering hospital for an appendectomy is among Ted Hughes’s application documents. Elsewhere, Joyce, in his 1915 application, writes that he receives “nothing in the way of royalties”, the sales of his books being “below the required number”. And Nesbit, author of The Railway Children, wrote in an August 1914 letter that the shock of her husband’s death “overcame me completely and now my brain will not do the poetry romance and fairy tales by which I have earned most of my livelihood”.

Lessing, who is the only British woman to have won the Nobel prize in literature, describes in a 1955 letter having moved to Britain in 1949 from Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, with £20, after the end of her marriage. When her debut novel, The Grass Is Singing, was published the following year, she left her job as a secretary and devoted her time to writing. “I have been living on my pen ever since, though very precariously,” she writes five years later, laying out details of debts she owed to friends, and the lack of help on offer from her family and ex-husband.

“It has been suggested that I should write scripts for murder stories for the commercial TV, but my short and unfruitful experience with this sort of work has made it clear that while I might earn a lot of money, I won’t be doing any serious work,” she writes.

The conflict between making art and earning a living through commercial work also makes itself clear in a letter by Ezra Pound in support of Joyce’s application. “He has lived for 10 years in obscurity and poverty, that he might perfect his writing and be uninfluenced by commercial demands.”

At the time of the application in July 1915, Joyce had fled Trieste, where he had first moved in 1904. He had published the poetry collection Chamber Music and short story collection Dubliners, and was working on Ulysses. In his letter, Pound describes the latter as “uneven”, but calls the forthcoming A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as having “indubitable value, and permanence” – an endorsement that helped win Joyce a grant. “If we ever get into cataloguing the books that might not exist without the RLF, I think we start with Ulysses and work down from there,” says Edward Kemp, the former director of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, who now runs the charity.

DH Lawrence, Bram Stoker and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were also RLF recipients. Welsh poet Thomas was supported by the charity from 1938 to his death in 1953. “I have been trying to live by my writing for five years, and have lived in poverty nearly all that time,” he wrote in his August 1938 application. “So far I have had to be content with poverty, and have always been fortunate to have just enough food and to have a room to work and sleep in. But now my wife is going to have a baby, and our position is desparate [sic]”.

Given that the RLF was not due to meet until mid-October that year, the charity forwarded his application to the Royal Bounty Fund (a somewhat shadowy taxpayer-funded operation that was wound down after more than 200 years in the early 2000s). But Whitehall didn’t mince words when rejecting the application:“If one is to put it brutally, ought Thomas – at 23 and apparently unable to support himself – to have married and be adding to his family? If he has taken on these responsibilities, ought he confine his activities to writing comparatively unremunerative verse, etc at a time when even the most successful find it difficult to make a living by literature?”

---

Nobody goes into writing for the money: today, professional authors in the UK earn a median income of £7,000, according to the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society. Looking at the starry names awarded grants through the RLF’s history makes clear that the challenges are not new. However, Kemp thinks the problem has become more acute in some regards. “The kinds of deal you get with a publisher as a mid-list fiction writer has gone down, down, down, down, down.” Twenty or 30 years ago, such writers could survive; it is now much tougher, he says. Big publishers are “paying large amounts of money to a small number of writers”. A “tiny percentage actually survive on what they’re making from writing.”

skip past newsletter promotion

after newsletter promotion

Ali Smith, Monique Roffey and Anna Burns are among the prominent contemporary writers whom the fund has supported, as well as Hanif Kureishi, after he suffered an accident that left him paralysed.

“On the one hand there are people like Joyce and DH Lawrence, who are early in their careers, and indeed Doris Lessing, who are struggling to get going, who have made a mark but are finding it hard to make ends meet. And at the other end there are people like Coleridge, and more recently Edna O’Brien, who have had stellar careers, and you’d have hoped actually were doing OK, but the vicissitudes of a writer’s life mean that sometimes it goes to pot.”

Gormenghast author Mervyn Peake first applied to the RLF in 1948 when he was struggling to complete the second novel in his fantasy series. By the 1960s, his health had declined, and his wife, Maeve Gilmore, applied for a second grant on his behalf. “He has been ill since 1956, with what was first diagnosed as a breakdown, but has subsequently [been] found to be encephalitis, with Parkinson’s disease as a consequence,” she writes in an October 1961 letter. (A posthumous study found that he in fact probably died of Lewy body dementia). “He has managed to do a little drawing, but work of a literary nature is no longer possible.”

The RLF saw a 400% increase in applications for hardship grants between 2023 and 2024. To be eligible, a writer has to have had two works professionally published. Grants are awarded for basic living expenses, costs associated with long-term disabilities or health conditions, and one-off costs like unexpected bills. Most of the RLF’s money comes from authors who bequeathed some or all of their literary estates to the charity, including Colin MacInnes, Somerset Maugham, AA Milne, Arthur Ransome and Ronald Blythe.

The archives unveil a complex web of literary connections: there is CS Lewis supporting Peake’s application, Henry James backing Joseph Conrad. “You look back, and people who you’d have thought are surviving as writers really aren’t,” says Kemp.

“You’d hope we didn’t have to exist,” he adds. But the organisation’s former tagline says it all: “Sometimes bad things happen to good writers.”

Archival quotations featured by permission of Jonathan Clowes Ltd on behalf of The Estate of Doris Lessing; The Estate of James Joyce; The Estates of Mervyn Peake and Maeve Gilmore; and New Directions Publishing Corp on behalf of Mary de Rachewiltz and the Estate of Omar S Pound, © 2025. All rights and credit of archival quotations go to the owners.