Breach of reason • On 3 June the Colombian poet Piedad Bonnett, now seventy-three years old, was declared the winner of the 2024 Premio Reina Sofía de Poesía Iberoamericana. The award – the most significant contemporary recognition of a writer from Latin America, which has recognised Nicanor Parra, Ida Vitale, Blanca Varela and Juan Gelman among others – was given for the whole coherent range of her work. As a rule, the Reina Sofía, presented by the University of Salamanca, sets out to honour writers for their specifically literary achievement which contributes to the traditions of literature in the Spanish and Portuguese languages, and has drawn attention to many whose voices are complex and uncompromised, voices that would be less likely to reach us without this recognition. The King’s Gold Medal for Poetry is the closest analogy in the Anglophone sphere, though its reach is not so wide as the Reina Sofía.

Bonnett, a doctor of letters from the University of the Andes, has published eight collections, edited anthologies, written on theatre, issued novels, as well as a book about the death of her son. In an interview in El País she remembered how a line of Miguel Hernández had moved her to write: ‘Porque la pena tizna cuando estalla’. The breach of reason by means of synaesthesia released a sense and an effect that were moving and in context true. About the central sincerity of her work, she said, ‘if there’s anything I carry forward from my upbringing it is an ethical value, I have never made things up. Use literature for lying? Why? The liar deceives himself.’ She describes her poetry as ‘accessible’ and for this among other reasons she was especially glad to receive the honour. It seemed to recognise her readers as much as her own achievement. Of her homeland, she declared, ‘this is a horrible country, and the poets have been able to show it as it is’.


Passing the torch • The magazine Five Dials, started in 2008, has sent out a ‘Dear Readers’ letter announcing its closure. It measured its age as running from ‘two years after Twitter and two years before Instagram’ – a ‘new generation of arts magazines, in that era when internet culture was colliding with literary culture in all kinds of exciting, alarming, unexpected ways. We wanted to create something which would be free to all, available online from anywhere in the world, and which would gather the best of the old and the new in surprising, playful combinations.’ The magazine was issued as a PDF. ‘Five Dials was sent into the world with a wry, honest, democratic, self-deprecating and open-hearted voice.’ It was clearly a fun exercise and widely enjoyed by its readers. ‘As the years passed, we began to travel worldwide to launch issues in collaboration with festivals – in Cornwall, in Montreal, in Amsterdam, in Jaipur – shaping the issues to reflect their launch places and gathering new readers along the way. We even had our own stage at the Port Eliot Festival (co-founded by Simon a few years before). The famous live countdown to Craig pressing “Send” on his laptop was one of the highlights of every launch, as some of you may remember.’

Its story ends in hope, not defeat. ‘Now, after a decade and a half, we think the time has come to pass the torch – to close Five Dials and make space for all the new talent fizzing at the margins, where we once stood, ready to forge new channels and find new forms. We can’t wait to see what the next generation will do.’ The archive in full remains available at penguin.co.uk/five-dials-archive. ‘Next time you remember Svetlana Alexievich’s extraordinary piece on Afghanistan, or Zadie Smith interviewing Eminem, or Deborah Levy’s alphabet of the death drive, it will be there, waiting for you to reread, or repost, or link to the friend who you know would love it.’


Sister tongues • Colin Bramwell writes: Aonghas Macneacail – or Aonghas Dubh, ‘Black Angus’ to the Gaels – was one of a select few writers in Scottish history whose work was written in all three tongues of Scotland. His writing in Scottish Gaelic – not just poetry, but journalism, libretti, radio plays – made him famous in Scotland and beyond. He was known as a modernising influence on Gaelic-language poetry, for embracing free verse and paying some heed to the popular American poetry of the 1970s, but his work was just as steeped in a modern Anglo-Celtic lyricism, and owed as much to Sorley Maclean and Norman MacCaig as it did to Robert Creeley and Charles Olson.

Earlier this year beyond, a new collection of poems in English co-edited by myself and his partner Gerda Stevenson, was published by Shearsman Books. These later poems reflect on nature, aging, politics and love. In ‘last night’, the poet describes a dream in which ‘my language would embrace / its sister tongue’; but Aonghas’s readers will know that this is no dream, rather an accurate enough description of the Scottish linguistic hybridity that Aonghas’s work spoke to, and for.

Aonghas was born in Uig on Skye in 1942. The authoritarian religious atmosphere of his upbringing engendered the freedoms he took both on and off the page. His membership of Philip Hobsbaum’s writer’s group at Glasgow University led to lifelong friendships with other important Scottish writers of the last century: Alasdair Gray, Jim Kelman, Tom Leonard, Liz Lochhead. Towards the end of his life Aonghas spoke frequently about how important his membership of this group was to him. Much of the poet’s early work was composed in English, his language of education. An invitation to become writer-in-residence at Sabhal Mór Ostaig, Skye’s Gaelic college, renewed a commitment to his first language; a fellowship at Glasgow University reminded him to keep composing in English, too. Aonghas won the 1997 Stakis Prize for Scottish writer of the year, and the Saltire Society’s premier award, for his contributions to the intellectual life of his nation. These were significant.

Although Aonghas didn’t want to be pigeonholed as a Gaelic writer, his work in this language is exceptionally strong: poems such as ‘Thug Thu Dhomh Samhradh’ (‘You Gave Me Summer’) and ‘Tha Gaidhlig Beo’ (‘Gaelic is Alive’) have become part of the Scottish canon. An emissary for all corners of his nation, as unpretentious and genial on the page as he was in person, Aonghas Macneacail’s loss was felt keenly in Scotland, and nearly two years on from his passing he is still greatly missed here.


Turning for home • The Spanish writer Julia Uceda, born in Seville and recipient, in 2003, of Spain’s National Poetry Award, died in July at the age of ninety-eight. Her last book, the Poesías Completas, was released in 2023. She was invited to the United States to teach at Michigan State University and stayed on, writing mid-career collections there, and returning to Spain in 1970. Later she taught in Dublin, but settled permanently back in Spain, in Galicia, in 1970. ‘I have wandered all over the world, and I have come back again,’ she said at the launch of her last book. ‘When I was very small, only a few years old, if they were years, I asked my parents, “tell me, where was I before I was here?” That “here” has been very long, I don’t know how much further I’ll go or where I’ll get to, it’s all the same to me, because I have to keep on this path, but I’m returning to the place I came from before I was here.’


Fiona Bennett • Fiona Bennett, inspirational founder of The Poetry Exchange, has died after a short illness. A poet herself, as well as a theatre director, Fiona’s Poetry Exchange initiative, developed with her friend the actor Michael Shaeffer, led to an award-winning podcast and the ‘In the Company of Poems’ event series. The concept was simple: readers and poets shared stories of poems they relied on ‘as friends’. Her ingenious idea set up the kinds of conversations about poems that are vanishingly rare, close readings which engaged both head and heart, and which led to her ten-year anniversary anthology, Poems as Friends, published by Quercus just a few weeks before her diagnosis this summer.


Cowgirl poets • Tri-State Livestock News for 10 May previewed the thirty-eighth Annual Dakota Cowboy Gathering on 25–26 May at the Medora Community Center. The festivities were to be set going at 10am with ‘Ask a Cowgirl Poet’, a gathering of well-known cowgirl poet/singers Connie Gjermundson, Jo Lee Riley Lowman and Betty Lynn McCarthy to answer questions from an interviewer and the audience. The fiesta itself would get going with twenty-five or more entertainers, ‘a steady, fast moving pace of cowboy poets and western songs’. ‘Saturday night’s big main event kids off at 7:30pm, featuring Betty Lynn McCarthy of Buffalo, Missouri, Dorothy Vincent, Felton, Minnesota, Carson Houser of McClusky, North Dakota, and Jan Schiferl of Fordyce, Nebraska. Founder of the gathering, Bill Lowman, will handle the emcee chores.’ On Sunday the Cowboy Gospel singing was to start at 9am. Other artists performing were to include cowboy singer/bull rider Beni Paulson from North Dakota and old-time cowboy balladeer Kurt Rockeman of Great Falls, Montana. ‘Killdeer singer Patti Burian Ingman will emcee.’ Next year they should be invited to the South Bank Centre.


Banning books • The state of Utah officially banned thirteen books by seven authors, six of them women, from every public [state] school classroom and library, it was announced on 7 August. Margaret Atwood was fingered; also Judy Blume, Rupi Kaur and Sarah J. Maas. PEN America was fighting the ban. The listed books were forbidden under a new law that requires all of Utah’s public school districts to remove books if they are banned in three districts, or two school districts and five charter schools. The state has forty-one districts in total. The books were said to contain ‘pornographic or indecent’ material. This was an inaugural list: PEN expects the ban to be widened.

Banned books have to be ‘legally disposed of’, and ‘may not be sold or distributed’. Burning was not yet advised: dumpsters and composting, perhaps.