The Latest Breaking News from WH Auden

Exclusive: The newly released correspondence reveals how a strong bond developed between the Funeral Blues poet and the sex worker who broke into his home

Christopher Pelkey was shot and killed in a road range incident in 2021. On May 8, 2025, at the sentencing hearing for his killer, an AI video reconstruction of Pelkey delivered a victim impact statement. The trial judge reported being deeply moved by this performance and issued the maximum sentence…

Nicholas Jenkins’s exhaustive volume – part biography, part literary study, part marathon – draws together the many influences on the young writer, from the first world war to his fascination with the lead mines of the Pennines

A century on from the author’s death, the word ‘kafkaesque’ has survived wrangles over his estate, calls for its banishment and being used on the Simpsons and misused as a meme. How did it gain such a hold over culture?

Our communications lose character when we give up putting pen to paper. It’s hard to imagine an Auden poem celebrating the arrival of the night email

Handel’s majestic final oratorio holds its own in Oliver Mears’s searching new production; Marina Abramović channels Maria Callas; and a well-told tale of when Britten met Auden

From Charlotte Brontë grieving Emily to Ted Hughes lamenting a lamb, this exceptional anthology of poems is full of scholarly discernment

With the London scheme poised to go national, Observer writers make their cases for a few of the many overlooked, snubbed or merely forgotten figures who richly deserve recognition

He pioneered new formats, could get almost any guest in the world and conducted the best interviews ever. Parky was one of the finest broadcasters of any era