National Poetry Day celebrates its 25th anniversary on 3rd October with a campaign themed around ‘truth’. Each year there is a different theme inspiring thousands of events and workshops across the UK. They are taking place everywhere, from schools and libraries to...
Born on 11th August, 1887 in London, Enid Blyton wrote close to 800 stories. She had sold 600 million copies worldwide by the time of her death in 1968. In fact, she continues to sell in large numbers to this day. As recently as 2008, a staggering 40 years after her...
The year is 1904. Having learned to “hear” people’s speech by reading their lips with her hand and distinguish people by the vibration of their footsteps, a pioneering young woman from Alabama in the USA is the first-ever deaf and blind person to...
Alice Oswald has been appointed the first female Oxford Professor of Poetry in the role’s 300 year history. She will succeed Simon Armitage – who has just been elected as the UK’s new Poet Laureate – from 1 October 2019, to become the 46th Professor of Poetry, as...
On 8th July 1822, Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned when his boat overturned off the Italian coast. He’d been travelling home from visiting his friends, fellow Romantic poets, Lord Byron and James Leigh Hunt, to his home on the bay of Lerici in the north-west of the...
National Writing Day is the annual celebration of creative writing, designed to inspire people across the UK to tune into their writing skills. The initiative will be taking place across schools and other educational institutions on the 26th June 2019. It has been...
