Where have all the poets gone?

At last night's poetry café, writes Anita Sethi, Esther Morgan was left to read alone as Glyn Maxwell had vanished and Robin Robertson, his replacement, was delayed on a train from London. Fittingly - given the empty chair beside her - hers were finger-tingling poems about "ghostliness", about the many ways in which we are haunted.

Private investigations

It's still raining poets here: two bright young stars appeared at today's Poetry Cafe, both published in the Tower Poetry's new anthology which showcases seven young writers. Frances Leviston unfolds ideas about disembowelment, guilt, how falling in love remakes the world anew; about whether any idea is worth dying for ("a man on a pyre burns clear of any particulars"). She questions if it is "world empowering me or me empowering world". Olivia Cole's is an intense, haunting voice, perfectly capturing psychical and physical states in some astonishing imagery; breaking the ice, taking a shower, blood seeping through a black and white world.

Festival spirit

This Cheltenham Literature Festival is running until the end of this week. Can't make it yourself? Don't worry, we can't either - but but fortunately Anita Sethi, our woman in Gloucestershire, will be blogging from the festival every day to keep us up to date.

Keep it brief

A new £15,000 prize for short stories suggests Britain is finally getting over its obsession with the novel. And not before time, says Aida Edemariam.

Fo delights his audience with boyhood tales

The Nobel prize-winning writer Dario Fo regaled a sell-out audience at the Edinburgh international book festival yesterday with tales from his boyhood, and attributed his skills as a wordsmith to the great storytelling traditions of his Italian upbringing.

Lost in translation

The middle classes flock in droves to Hay-on-Wye for its festival of English literature, writes David Ward. The Guardian's G2 mob, fearful of disorientation outside the capital, turn up in a London Routemaster.

Pinch, punch …

The folks at the Observer Review section yesterday celebrated the imminent arrival of August by listing 31 things you could do to make your month a veritable blancmange of culture - all the way from making a date with Leicester's excellent Expo Festival to catching cult Japanese horror writer Koji Suzuki discoursing in Edinburgh, from devouring Little Britain Night on BBC7 to attending the ICA's B+B exhibition, which celebrates London's position as a global cultural hub. (We could give you the dates for all these things, but we think you should read the article in full because it's great.)

New talent discovered at Port Eliot

Yesterday I stopped by the Literary Consultancy tent here at the festival just as Natascha Wolf was dropping the first 30 pages of her unpublished novel into a waste bin in a bid to find out if it was "rubbish" or not. Natascha came back this morning to get an expert opinion from one of the Consultancy's readers - Rob Collins, himself a published novelist.