Here are a couple of writers featured on the Archive:

New to the Archive:

© Image by Luke Davies

Luke Davies (b.1962) is a critically acclaimed poet, novelist, and screenplay writer. Davies was raised in the Sydney suburb of West Pymble, and studied Arts at the University of Sydney. His third volume Running With Light won the 2000 Judith Wright Poetry Prize, while his most recent collection, Totem, won the 2005 South Australian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry, the Grace Leven Poetry Prize 2004, The Age’s Poetry Book of the Year Award and the overall Age Book of the Year Award. In 2004 Davies was also awarded the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal for Poetry. Davies has published three novels, Isabelle the Navigator, the bestselling Candy, subsequently made into a film for which he co-wrote the screenplay. He recently shot a short film, Air, which he wrote and directed, in West Texas.

And a sample of the historical readings available:

© Image by Rollie McKenna

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) is a poet whose troubled life and powerful work remains a source of controversy. Born in Boston in the USA she was precociously intelligent, publishing her first poem at the age of eight. The same year her German father, Otto, died suddenly, a trauma which surfaces in her poetry repeatedly. Plath suffered from bouts of severe depression throughout her life, her first serious breakdown occurring in 1953 and later remembered in her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar (1963). This episode led to her first suicide attempt, but she recovered and graduated from Smith College, Massachusetts before winning a Fullbright Scholarship to Cambridge University. Here she met the English poet, Ted Hughes, their passionate courtship leading quickly to marriage in June 1956. After two years teaching in the United States the couple returned to the UK when Plath became pregnant, their daughter Frieda being born in April 1960. By this time Hughes was established as a significant new voice in British poetry, but now Plath’s own first collection The ColossusBirthday Letters, which give his view of their marriage in a series of tender and searing poems. Plath’s own work, with its intense sometimes shocking use of metaphor and her exploration of extreme states of mind, refuses to be overshadowed by her tragic biography: in 1982 she became the first poet to be posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her Collected Poems.

To hear these readings go to The Poetry Archive homepage.  You will need a version of RealPlayer to play the readings