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Set in Tobago and first staged in 1978, Derek Walcott's play Pantomime is a two-act comedy about an English hotelier who proposes to his Trinidadian employee that they act together in a race-reversed satire of Robinson Crusoe.

Operating a rundown...

Judith Wright was an Australian poet and critic known for writing as well as her campaigns for peace, environmental conservation, and Aboriginal land rights. In "Woman to Man," published in the 1949 collection of the same name, a woman ponders the...

The Two Gentlemen of Verona was written by William Shakespeare sometime between 1590 and 1594, thus placing it among the earliest of the Bard’s plays. Some scholars suggest that the play was likely the very first play Shakespeare wrote for the...

Judith Wright was a prominent Australian writer known for her poetry, criticism, and activism. Originally published in the 1966 collection The Other Half, "Eve to Her Daughters" presents the biblical Eve as a speaker addressing her daughters (the...

By the time he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, Harold Pinter was recognized as one of the most widely-performed and influential contemporary playwrights. Born to a Jewish family in the Hackney area of East London in 1930,...

The Two Noble Kinsmen is a Jacobean tragicomedy involving two cousins who battle for their city and fall in love with one woman. The play is based on "The Knight's Tale" from Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, a long poem written in Middle...

Published in 2018 by Nick Hern Books, Leave Taking is a play written by British playwright Winsome Pinnock. It was first performed in 1987 and has since become a significant work in contemporary British theater. The play has also been featured in...

Princess & The Hustler (2019) is author and playwright Chinonyerem Odimba's play-turned-novel, which tells the story of a young girl named Princess, who hatches a plan to win the Weston-Super-Mare Beauty Contest sometime in 1963 Bristol,...

My Name Is Leon is a fiction novel written by Kit de Waal. It was first published in 2016. As a former magistrate and social worker, De Waal drew upon her experiences from her professional background to write this story. The novel is set in 1980s...

Composed sometime between 1595 and 1603, the first recorded performance of William Shakespeare’s tragicomedy All’s Well That Ends Well took place on November 8, 1623. That the next recorded performance did not occur until 1741 provides some...

“Poppies” is a poem written by Anglo-Italian poet Jane Weir. It appears in Exit Wounds, a collection commissioned by Carol Ann Duffy in 2009. Weir has described “Poppies” as “a contemporary war poem about war in its various guises.” The poem...

"Island Man" is a poem by esteemed Guyanese-British author Grace Nichols, who was recently awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. “Island Man” was published in her 1984 book The Fat Black Woman’s Poems.

The poem describes a man who awakes...

El Filibusterismo was the second novel written by Filipino writer and nationalist José Rizal. He published the book in 1891 as the sequel to his first novel, Noli Me Tangere or The Social Cancer. El Filibusterismo, known in English as The Reign of...

Acclaimed African-American poet Langston Hughes wrote and published "Night Funeral in Harlem," one of his many poems about the black experience in America, in 1951. Hughes fervently believed that segregation and racism were some of the worst and...

Langston Hughes penned this poem in 1926 and it was published as part of a collection later that year. It is written from the perspective of a single speaker who tells of the dreams that the African American community have of freedom and equality...

Famed American poet Langston Hughes' poem "Democracy" was first published as a part of one of Hughes' poetry collections (entitled One-Way Ticket) in 1949. Broadly, the poem is told from the perspective of a young Black man dealing with the racism...

The Wild Iris is a collection of poems published in 1992 by American poet Louise Glück. Considered to be among the most talented American contemporary poets, Glück is known for her technical mastery, the distinct voices in her poems, and her...

Bad Dreams (2017) by Tessa Hadley is a collection of six separate but thematically connected short stories. Broadly, they tell the stories of people who have to deal with difficult situations. One story follows two sisters who begin to fight...

Catching Teller Crow (2019) was written by the sister-brother team Ambelin and Ezekiel Kwaymullina. A thriller, Kwaymullina's novel is told from the perspective of two Aboriginal protagonists. One of those protagonists is the father of Beth Teller...

Jean Lee Latham's Carry On, Mr. Bowditch (first published in 1955) is a children's biography about Nathaniel Bowditch, an American sailor, and mathematician responsible for one of the most essential books for seamen of the 18th and 19th centuries:...

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian author born in 1977, whose literary works include short stories, novels, speeches, and non-fiction. According to The New Literary Supplement (NLS), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is the most well-known and...