RITA DI SANTO draws attention to a new film that features Ken Loach and Jeremy Corbyn, and their personal experience of media misrepresentation
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NICANOR PARRA: A polymath who reconfigured the landscape of Latin American poetry
JULIA TOPPIN recommends Patti Smith’s eloquent memoir that wrestles with the beauty and sorrow of a lifetime
MARJORIE MAYO welcomes an account of family life after Oscar Wilde, a cathartic exercise, written by his grandson
KEN COCKBURN guides us through a survey of Chekov’s early short fiction, and the groundwork it laid for his later masterpieces
ANDY HEDGECOCK revels in a hugely enjoyable but deadly serious examination of the 1930s, that is an indictment of our own era
The bard distills our hellish times into fiery words
CHILEAN poet Nicanor Parra, who died recently aged 103, repeatedly scared the Nobel Prize for Literature bureaucracy shitless. It invented lame excuses every time somebody had him nominated and his name went forward on four occasions.
But his prestige was never in doubt with his millions of readers throughout Latin America and beyond.
The oldest of eight siblings in a prolific artistic family — a sister was the legendary singer Violeta Parra — he was a true polymath but the only child the family could afford to educate.
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ANDY CROFT welcomes the publication of an anthology of recent poems published by the Morning Star, and hopes it becomes an annual event
RUTH AYLETT reviews two collections of outright political poetry
A novel by Argentinian Jorge Consiglio, a personal dictionary by Uruguayan Ida Vitale, and poetry by Mexican Homero Aridjis
An outstanding novel by Chilean writer and activist Pedro Lemebel, a poetry pamphlet by Venezuelan Natasha Tiniacos, and a children’s book of haikus singing the beauty of Cuba