Great Regulars: [Pam] Ayres, though, took to Twitter this morning

after actor Tanya Franks told her that she'd "just read your 50 Shades of Grey poem--the mental images of Mabel and hubby are laughingly and howlingly disturbing". Indeed. Ayres, though, says she "DID NOT write this poem. It is doing the rounds on the internet etc, but it is nothing to do with me".

from Alison Flood: The Guardian: 50 Shades of Pam Ayres pastiche. Join the BDSM fun

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Quoting Ted Hughes's assertion that "Even the most misfitting child/Who's chanced upon the library's worth,/Sits with the genius of the Earth/And turns the key to the whole world", a review of ebook lending in libraries commissioned by the government has found that libraries risk becoming irrelevant if they do not start lending digital books.

from Alison Flood: The Guardian: Digital library loans get government backing

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A poem inspired by her late mother's stories of the first world war, which has drawn comparisons with Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, has won the poetry journal Agenda's editor Patricia McCarthy the National Poetry Competition.

McCarthy, who has published several poetry collections of her own, beat 13,040 other entries to win the anonymously-judged prize. Her winning poem, "Clothes that escaped the Great War", tells of the plodding carthorse who would take boys away to war, and then return, later, with just their clothes.

from Alison Flood: The Guardian: First world war poem wins National Poetry Competition 2013

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In what its editors have admitted is a "flagrant" violation of Willa Cather's wishes, a selection of letters from the much-loved American author are set to be published for the first time next month, more than 65 years after her death in 1947.

Cather, best known today for her novels of early American pioneer life My Ántonia and O Pioneers! and for the acclaimed Death Comes for the Archbishop, forbade the publication of her letters in her will as she hoped to be judged on her work alone.

from Alison Flood: The Guardian: Willa Cather's letters published in defiance of her will

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