The Swiss novelist and story-writer ADOLF MUSCHG was awarded the 1994 Bchner Prize. In an interview in Die Wochewith Rolf Hosfeld, he sounded every inch a Swiss writer answering a German interlocutor and rejecting the politically poisoned cup of questions he was offered: 'Hölderlin saw the Danube flow backwards… frankly, it's not mad to believe that good writing creates spaces in which we can once again learn to love things, feelings, moments. 1968 tried to put the world to rights and failed. At present there are a few people who, scattered though they may be, are beginning to improve relations between things and words, and that's quite a revolution.' He went on to defend the problematic writer Botho Strauss, stigmatised as the manifestation of a perilous new conservatism. 'In his case I appreciate a balance, on the knife's edge, which manages to avoid falling either way.' He celebrated 'common sense' for which, he reflected, there is no German equivalent.

In December LORAND GASPAR was awarded the Grand Prix National de Poésie 1994. After his review in PNR Review 101, Roger Little will contribute a longer article on Gaspar whose work is increasingly available in English translation.

Following the deaths of Ruth Pitter, Anthony Burgess and William Golding, there are three new Companions of Literature: Sybille Bedford, Sir Vidia Naipaul and William Trevor.

One of Israel's most remarkable modern poets, the American-born T. CARMI (Carmi Charney), died in Jerusalem in November at the age of 59. The son of a rabbi and thus a Hebrew-speaker from childhood, his first poems in Hebrew were published when he was still an American undergraduate, well before he travelled to Europe. His poetry is unusual in its diction which combines the language of Biblical and Midrashic traditions, elements from the full range of Hebrew verse (of which he was the major modern anthologist with the unprecedented 1981 Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse), and the contemporary idiom one hears in the streets of Israel. A striking characteristic of the poems is their unexpected transposition of sacred and religious ideas into erotic experience. Carmi will be remembered as a quite outstanding poet of physical love.

The Welsh poet HARRI WEBB died in Swansea on the last day of 1994 at the age of 74. He wrote a few poems in Welsh, one of them so well-loved that it gained the currency of a traditional song, and he translated Neruda into his mother tongue, but the bulk of his writing is in English. He was a poet of the left and a Welsh Nationalist, inspired to a degree by Hugh MacDiarmid. He was a vigorous platform speaker ('sonorous utterance' being the point of his poetic as of his political language), ran for Parliament on the Plaid Cymru ticket, and became a memorable force in Welsh politics as in Welsh poetry. His friend and literary executor Meic Stephens wrote in the Independent 'His last public act was to announce, in 1985, that he would write no more in English, adding with characteristic hyperbole that English was "a dying language" and that the only language for a true Welshman was Welsh.'

GEORGE STEINER was installed as the Lord Weidenfeld Visiting Professor of European Contemporary Literature at Oxford on 11 October, delivering his Inaugural: 'What is Comparative Literature?' He has no illusions about the importance, or the powerlessness, of the chair, and in a lecture bristling with suggestion, contention and insight, the political asides are crucial. 'In paradoxical ways,' he says, 'the status of English as the planetary tongue, as the only working "esperanto" of science, trade and finance, has further isolated England from the post-Latin and German heritage of mainland Europe.'

He adds, 'It would be fatuous bombast to suppose that any individual plea or contribution, especially from within the suspect, because still partly sheltered, confines of the academic could make much difference. The vaunt of money and the mass-media mocks the voice of the intellectual - a designation which can itself be used only with a considerable measure of irony and of re are we to preach to others? What treason sadder than that of many face of political seduction and mer reflections recall the dramatic Oct at the German Theatre in Berlin b and cultural veteran of the stature or Walter Janka, shortly before his death. Recalling own show trial in East Germany, he Miguel de Unamuno's statement, when Fascists occupied the Salamanca: 'There are times when to be is to lie.' Steiner makes his bold statement under a less pressing, but no less absolute, threat to the culture and values underpin more than the academic world from which his voice, Unamuno's, reaches us.

The Modern Language Association awarded the prestigious Scaglione Prize for Translation to ESTELLE GILSON for her translations of Umberto Saba, The stories and Recollections, published in the United States by Sheep Meadow Press.

A centenary conference will celebrate the and work of DAVID JONES (1895-1974) on 20-21 April at the University of Warwick. Speakers will include Bernard Bergonzi, Simon Brett, Jacques Darras and several others. Further details from Marian Secretary, European Humanities Research Centre, Room HI04 (Humanities), University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL.

The imprint Collins Harvill is being reborn to its original name HARVILL, the indomitable Christopher Maclehose having released the list from long bondage in the land of Murdoch. Harvill is independent again; unlike most other new independents it brings a unique history with it: Maclehose leads Harvill out of Egypt with the tribe intact, with his incomparable back1ist, from Lampedusa to Perec and Saramago. He has recruited a fine editor in Sarah Westcott, and from Waterstone's has acquired John Mitchinson, a bookseller who loves books, understands the book trade and the balance sheet. Harvill may well remain the unusually bright beacon of English fiction publishing.