Theo Dorgan has been awarded the Irish Times Poetry Now award for his most recent collection, 'Nine Bright Shiners'.

Happy St David's Day, and if you're expecting to let the sun in, see it wipes its feet first.

The worst that can happen to you on a theatre night out in Dublin is that you will be bored. At the end of the sixteenth century in Elizabethan London you ran the risk of being impressed into the army to die fighting the wild Irish.

On such a night as this, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe strode out by night in the Eternal City as the moon stood high and serene and the sweet wind gently kissed the trees - perhaps.

Young cock robin, extensive territory, HWP, D/D free, red breast, seeks hen. When a bird sings, it sings itself, and principally what species it is. A robin after all can do very little of any interest or to any purpose with a wren.

After the fall of France in 1940, Joyce became increasingly uncomfortable. In December he went back to his former home of Zurich, but died there suddenly in January of the following year.

Britain's most valuable poetry prize, funded by the estate of TS Eliot, has gone to David Harsent for his collection Fire Songs.

The American novelist Kent Haruf, whose novels were set in small town Colorado, died late last year. 'I don't feel like death is right round the corner. But if it is, it's a bigger corner than I thought it was.'”

Having no intimates, and no one to whom she could confide her feelings, Frances Burney addressed them confidently to Nobody.

Whatever we have done, or whatever we have failed to do, may pursue us through restless nights for many decades after our conscious minds have forgotten it all.

The great romantic poet found the Adriatic city to be a place where he could indulge both his spiritual and intellectual longings and his more carnal ones.

Paul Laurence Dunbar was considered the most promising African American writer at the turn of the twentieth century. A musical for which he wrote the lyrics was performed in Dublin 110 years ago.

German novelist Siegfried Lenz, who has died aged 88, was a political collaborator of Günter Grass and a champion of reconciliation between Germany and the countries it had devastated in the Second World War.

You put your right leg in, your right leg out. In, out, in, out. You shake it all about. You do the Hokey Cokey and you turn around. That's what it's all about.

Gilbert White, an 18th century country parson and naturalist, wrote in sumptuous detail of the animal and bird life he observed around him. Here he is on the varieties of birdsong.

With his fortieth birthday the realisation came to Philip Larkin that he had done nothing with the `fat fillet-steak' part of life.

László Krasnahorkai talks to George Szirtes about how he writes and what he reads.

Why did the soldiers join up and go to be slaughtered in France, Belgium or Gallipoli? Sometimes because the misery of their lives made them think that anything would be better.

An episode from the early 1880s shows a young Augusta Gregory sympathising with an oppressed people and its revolutionary leaders - far from Ireland.

John Clare, the Northamptonshire peasant poet who died 150 years ago, is not getting the commemoration he deserves in Britain.