poetry

The Nobel Prize winner celebrated his Caribbean homeland and described its brutal colonial history. "You didn't make yourself a poet," he said. "You entered a situation in which there was poetry."

Archaeologists suspect that the damaged statue, more than 25 feet tall, depicts Ramses II — aka Ozymandias. One of English literature's most famous poems describes a broken, forgotten statue of him.

Ali Cobby Eckermann, an Australian indigenous poet forcibly taken from her family as a child, discovered without warning last week she had just won one of the richest literary prizes in the world.

The former Poet Laureate recently joined NPR fans on Facebook Live. He talked about the inspiration for a poem imagining a Keith Richards-based mythology, and offered a tip to aspiring writers: Read.

Solmaz Sharif's collection, Look, has just been shortlisted for a National Book Award. Playing on the military language in a Department of Defense lexicon, it's a wrenching look at war and duality.

Colson Whitehead, Jacqueline Woodson and Rita Dove are just three of the authors on the shortlists for the National Book Awards. The 20 books still in contention for the prizes were unveiled Thursday.

And then there were 40: This week, the National Book Foundation revealed the writers who are still in contention for its literary prize. It capped the rollout Thursday with the fiction nominees.

On July 1, 1916, nearly 20,000 British soldiers died on the first day of the Battle of the Somme in northern France. The battle went on for months, and more than a million men were killed or injured.