Congratulations to Grace Dent who, this week in Independent Voices, has identified the problem with young women today; discussing the pornification of everyday culture, irresponsible role models for our children and how technology plays a role in the easy distribution of pornography and hastily taken nude photographs. However,...

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A couple of weeks ago, I did not know what 50 Shades of Grey even was. I'd heard it was soft porn for women, with an unlikely romance at its centre, written around the framework of what was originally Twilight fan fiction. I avoided it...

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...