Sian S. Rathore

Being a writer is tough. In a world where everyone who owns a Macbook and lives near a coffee house is a novelist, getting your work recognised is difficult, having it appraised even harder. Given the adage that 'everyone's a critic' now, there are a surprisingly small amount of critics...

The Guardian recently published this piece about creativity and suffering. It is true that over the years we have associated madness and despair with creative output, somehow linking creativity as a condition comorbid to most mental disorders; there is a myth of the beautiful mind, of...

The most recent book launch I went to was Nikolai Duffy's in Manchester. Most of the crowd were friends and colleagues of Duffy's, some of us students, many of us students of English and Creative Writing, most of us poets ourselves. Duffy's work was an innovative collection of poems...