Homer is anything but a diversion: her poetry has been haunted by his for as long as she's been writing. She first encountered him at grammar school, in snatches and snippets at O-level, and then through The Odyssey in the sixth form. "I completely fell in love with it," she says. "I asked if I could forget about the rest of the syllabus and just do Homer, and amazingly, my teacher said yes. After I left school, I spent my year off reading The Iliad, which was almost better. Shockingly good."Such an immersive experience proved formative.
from Sarah Crown: The Guardian: Alice Oswald: haunted by Homer
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11.22am: Good morning, and welcome to our first-ever Nobel prize for literature liveblog. The prize is announced at 1pm in Sweden--that's 12 noon our time. You can watch a live webcast of the announcement here (and I strongly advise you to do so: sitting around watching a webcast of a pair of gilt doors constitutes my favourite moment of the literary year. The excitement when the doors finally open is quite out of proportion). We'll post the winner as soon his or her name is announced, and then round up reaction, extracts and whatever else we can lay our hands on.
from Sarah Crown: The Guardian: Nobel prize for literature--as it happened
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Really neat piece from Slate magazine explaining what we did when we needed a rhetorical embodiment of evil, before Adolf Hitler came along. Apparently the Pharoah from the book of Exodus, who preferred to endure 10 (literally) biblical plagues rather than release the Israelites from slavery, was the go-to man for a long time.
from Sarah Crown: The Guardian: Whose name was shorthand for evil, before we had Hitler?
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