In an unexpected twist, a Hollywood epic has contributed to Britain’s best-ever half-year in poetry sales
In a short story called Career Move, published in the New Yorker in 1992, Martin Amis imagined a world in which screenwriters wrote for little magazines and earned a pittance while poets were global superstars. Amis’s story, a wonderfully ironic inversion of the time-honoured norm, was surprisingly prescient: the film and TV industries have been struggling, with screenwriters facing contracting outlets for their creations, whereas poets are now big business.
The Bookseller reported recently that poetry sales were at a historic high. Part of the increase can be attributed to Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey, which has made Homer hot: editions of The Odyssey and its prequel, The Iliad, have garnered almost £1m in book sales in the UK this year. (As well as valiantly trying to keep the ailing film industry afloat, Nolan has also created a craze for epic poetry.) But Nolan’s film does not solely account for the boom in poetry sales. Even without the Homer run, sales of poetry texts and anthologies were still up by 7.2% from what was historically already a very high base.
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