Andrew Stauffer conveys the vigour and pace of the poet’s escapades with brio, but stumbles when he suggests Byron anticipated modern celebrity

Wordsworth called poetry “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”, but in Byron’s case the unstoppable overflow consisted of a more vital and potent bodily fluid. “Is it not life?” he asked about his comic epic Don Juan , the annals of a globe-trotting seducer; he added that his qualification for writing it was that he had “tooled” in a post chaise, a hackney coach, a gondola, against a wall, and both on and under a table. He claimed to do his rhyming, as he nonchalantly called it, “at night / When a Cunt is tied close to my inkstand”, and on receiving royalty cheques from his publisher he vowed that “what I get by my brains I will spend on my bollocks”.

When not drinking, gambling and having sex, Byron also tossed off 3,000 letters, which race to keep up with the flux of his sensations as he reels through adulterous intrigues, literary squabbles and political conspiracies. Here, even more than in Don Juan , he writes while living in an unfinished present tense. Postscripts and interruptions, as Andrew Stauffer says, give his correspondence a “risky immediacy”, with “rapid-fire, time-stamped updates”; punctuation increases the tempo in a blitz of breathless dashes.

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Imogen Wade’s The Time I Was Mugged in New York City impresses judges for ‘lyricism in the account of an abduction’

• Scroll down to read the winning poem

A poem inspired by the author’s experience of being mugged has won the first prize of £5,000 in the National Poetry Competition.

The Time I Was Mugged in New York City by Imogen Wade tells the story of being locked in a van at JFK airport by a man dressed in black, driven to Grand Central station and made to give the man money.

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This evocation of springtime quickly takes on a darker tone and stands among the author’s unforgettable works

The saddest noise, the sweetest noise (No 1789)

The saddest noise, the sweetest noise,
The maddest noise that grows, —
The birds, they make it in the spring,
At night’s delicious close,

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Poet laureate produces 10 poems, haiku and a musical EP, working with National Trust as it renews its blossom campaign

He imagines blossom as fancy dress, as an artist or a magician lighting up countryside, town and city. Yes, it is a thing of beauty and joy but also, sometimes, a pertinent reminder of changing climate patterns.

On World Poetry Day and to celebrate spring, the poet laureate, Simon Armitage , has launched a collection celebrating the bright blossom that sweeps through the UK at this time of year.

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The six-strong list of titles include novels, short stories and poetry, with the winning writer to receive £20,000 when revealed in May

Mary Jean Chan, Caleb Azumah Nelson and AK Blakemore are among the shortlistees for this year’s Swansea University Dylan Thomas prize .

The award, worth £20,000, celebrates poetry, novels, short stories and drama by writers aged 39 and under in honour of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who died at that age.

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A warm and generous-minded tribute from an older poet to the ‘brighter plumage, stronger wing’ of his younger colleague

To Robert Browning

There is delight in singing, tho’ none hear
Beside the singer; and there is delight
In praising, tho’ the praiser sit alone
And see the prais’d far off him, far above.
Shakspeare is not our poet, but the world’s,
Therefore on him no speech! and brief for thee,
Browning! Since Chaucer was alive and hale,
No man hath walkt along our roads with step
So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue
So varied in discourse. But warmer climes
Give brighter plumage, stronger wing: the breeze
Of Alpine highths thou playest with, borne on
Beyond Sorrento and Amalfi, where
The Siren waits thee, singing song for song.

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Anne Enright triumphs in fiction category for The Wren, The Wren and Observer art critic Laura Cumming wins non-fiction with Thunderclap: A Memoir of Life and Art and Sudden Death

Three women have triumphed in this year’s Writers’ prize, formerly known as the Rathbones Folio prize, with poet Liz Berry winning the overall book of the year award, worth £30,000.

Berry won the £2,000 poetry prize as well as the overall award for her collection The Home Child , a novel-in-verse inspired by the poet’s great-aunt, who at 12 years old was forced to move from the Black Country to Canada as part of the British child migrant schemes.

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The American poet and musician’s new album The Great Bailout tracks the money given to British slaveowners – including David Cameron’s ancestors. She explains why she is pessimistic about getting true justice

‘The aftermath of enslavement just doesn’t wash away with bleach. It doesn’t wash away with new buildings. It doesn’t wash away with so-called diversity and representation.” The voice of poet and musician Camae Ayewa, known as Moor Mother, commands your whole attention even over a video call. Within minutes of connecting with her, it’s clear that when she speaks, she does so not to impress or to serenade, but to tell the truth. “In the last [interview] I did in the Guardian I said we have yet to deal with the repercussions of enslavement. Everyone got mad at me for saying it. How have we?”

That interview was back in 2017 . Since then, the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests brought the discourse around systemic racism and colonialism to the forefront of public attention and so today, Ayewa’s ruminations – about our slowness to reckon with the effects of the slave trade – wouldn’t be deemed as “fringe” as they once were. However, her suspicions remain as strong today as they were seven years ago. “I don’t think [much] has changed. It’s still the same thing. Just dressed in different, more modern clothing,” she says. “Technology is advancing and more information is coming out, but we have [yet] to do the due diligence to put pressure on our governments and make a stand.”

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The author of The English Patient returns to poetry with a valedictory collection that is at home with the unknown and the romance of the incomplete

Michael Ondaatje has always been a poet – it is how he began his career 50 years ago – although he is more famous as a novelist and especially for his 1992 Booker prize-winning The English Patient (which also won the Golden Man Booker in 2018). In A Year of Last Things , he is writing about last – and lost – things. He is not interested in the known quantity, has always been more at home with the unknown, and is extraordinarily attuned to hauntings, to the idea that missing pieces are likely to inform whatever remains. The opening poem, Lock, begins:

Reading the lines he loves
he slips them into a pocket,
wishes to die with his clothes
full of torn-free stanzas

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