Poem

The life and work of one of Africa's most celebrated writers...“There was a writer named Chinua Achebe… in whose company the prison walls fell down.” Nelson Mandela Chinua Achebe was born on the 16th November, 1930.

John Clare is now one of England's best-loved poets, but for a long time he was almost entirely forgotten The literary canon has always had its gaps and prejudices.

A radical poet whose work was burned by the Nazis in Germany... spent his life interpreting the cold facts of political economy, but he still managed to find time for poems. Poetry, he believed, could make vivid the struggle of the masses.

Today in 1793, John Clare was born in rural Northamptonshire. He emerged from a peasant world to become a national poet, and his poetry was marked by the worsening inequalities and injustices in Britain at the beginning of the industrial age.