Don’t give up your day job: how Australia’s favourite authors are making ends meet
According to new research, writing books brings in $18,200 a year on average. This leaves the celebrated authors we spoke to hustling seven days a week
The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem by Matthew Hollis review – a classic laid bare
TS Eliot’s life and influences are meticulously investigated in this impressive account of artistic creation
Poem of the week: 7th Nerve by Rhiannon Hooson
A hi-tech medical exam draws its subject back to a more archaic, essential experience
The best books to give as presents this Christmas
Authors and Observer critics choose the books they will be giving as gifts this year – and the one they’d like to find in their own stocking
On my radar: Colm Tóibín’s cultural highlights
The Irish writer on New York’s hidden music scene, poetry and the wonders of Peru
The best recent poetry – review roundup
Embark by Sean O’Brien; Liquid Flesh: New and Selected Poems by Brenda Shaughnessy; Visions & Feed by Maria Sledmere; Improvised Explosive Device by Arji Manuelpillai; Forevernoon by Ásta Fanney Sigurðardóttir
For Ukrainians, poetry isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity during war
Poetry is fulfilling a very human need – to make sense of the senseless and tell their stories, says the Guardian’s chief culture writer Charlotte Higgins
Poem of the week: Holy Sonnet XIX by John Donne
The great love poet is here locked in an anxious wrestle with his religious conscience
The best poetry books of 2022
Meditations on modern Britain, 100 queer poems, and evocations of the natural world are among this year’s standout collections
Michael Rosen writes poem in tribute to NHS nurses after Covid recovery
Children’s author who spent 48 days in hospital with virus calls NHS ‘a brilliant and wonderful invention’
Kim Moore wins Forward poetry prize for ‘phenomenal’ poems about everyday sexism
All the Men I Never Married took the £10,000 award for best collection, while Stephanie Sy-Quia and Nick Laird were also winners in other categories
Poem of the week: The Twa Corbies by Anonymous
In this possibly very ancient Scottish ballad, two carrion crows cast a cold and hungry eye over a dead knight
The Thirteenth Angel by Philip Gross review – on Earth and in heaven
Gross’s attractive intelligence and questing eye are to the fore in his 27th collection, a contender for the TS Eliot prize
Poem of the week: Foxglove Country by Zaffar Kunial
A complicated pastoral explores the semantic undergrowth hidden in the English language
‘An acutely difficult time’: companies respond to Arts Council funding decisions
In our third set of case studies exploring the impact of Arts Council England’s new funding round, we hear from Eclipse theatre in Leeds, Oldham Coliseum and Bloodaxe Books