Whatever bravado I might show to the world, only I know how greedy I am for a night's – even a single night's – sleep. I have read an encyclopaedic amount of literature about insomnia, I have heard lullabies in thirteen different languages, I have tried lavender aromatherapy and temple massage techniques.

Only poets can heroically sacrifice the golden throne

Sleep is an allergy, a reaction against the day's useless welfare programmes. It is alright for people to have no memory of dreams in their sleep, but to have no memory of sleeping is a nightmare.

If you ever feel like you've made a wrong decision in life, just think about the 12 publishers who rejected Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone before finally the 8-year-old daughter of Bloomsbury's editor demanded to read the rest of the manuscript her father had shown her.

Jamaican author Marlon James wins the Man Booker Prize for his novel inspired by the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in the 1970s.

Local time is now twelve past one

Very few books ever fail to draw us into an ever deeper contemplation of literature, no matter how many times we turn to them. Rabindranath's Novel: Patterns of Thought and Representation ([1977] 2014) by Syed Akram Hossain belongs to that slim, selective canon.

Svetlana Alexievich, this year's Nobel laureate for literature, says her approach is to let "human voices speak for themselves".

Belarusian writer and journalist Svetlana Alexievich wins the 2015 Nobel Prize for literature.

Will the prize awarding body choose to honor the occasion by picking a female winner? Will it break new ground by giving the prize to a journalist? Or will it rush to bestow the coveted prize on one of the many aging favorites?

Acclaimed Irish playwright Brian Friel has dies aged 86 after a long illness.

They were sitting on the waiting area outside the doctor's chamber. She was heavily pregnant; probably on the verge. The woman with the baby bump was twenty nine, carrying her first child; rather late, some would say, for a first baby. She was accompanied by her mother-in-law.

The day begins long before you decide to welcome it, grace it with your selfish toast, and face it from your dire straits.

Every now and then when free He would stand next to me.

It's happening again. A familiar rage unfolds its sticky wings within the captive interior of my chest: a monstrous butterfly emerging gracelessly from its cocoon.

The sky so full of stars

I remember reading books that had long descriptions. Some writers do love to describe. JRR Tolkien, for instance, is one of those fantasy gurus who created a world that is beyond our . . . no, not imagination—the conceptions of the elves, ogres, goblins, etc. had already existed inside our small vocabulary boxes before Tolkien's words pierced through our thought bubbles and gave birth to an Orc and a world beyond our, yes, expectation.

Poets are expected to be “odd characters,” eccentric and reclusive, a riddle and a mystery. They live in a world of their own.

I cannot believe I am sitting next to him, yet again, on a plane. How many times we have done this, how many flights, transfers, holidays, my passport and ticket always with him, even my boarding card; he was the man, the head of the family, he held the travel documents.

Whenever Indians, Bangladeshis or Pakistanis come together to discuss literature, past and present, the question of English inevitably arises.