Orhan Pamuk, Libraries, Your best books of 2004

Why shouldn't libraries sell books, asks minister - Margaret Hodge raises prospect of libraries expanding role beyond lending books in major reconsideration of policy. Libraries risk sleepwalking through the century unless radical ideas are implemented, the arts minister Margaret Hodge claimed today, at the launch of a long-delayed, much-anticipated consultation document on the future of libraries in the UK.


'Twitter' declared top word of 2009

Orhan Pamuk puts Tanpinar's tale of two continents back on the map - Sixty years after it was first published, the "Turkish Ulysses" finally gets its due, thanks to a literary festival and museum set up in its honour - Orhan Pamuk, the 2006 Nobel literature laureate, is preparing to open a Museum of Innocence in Istanbul next summer, and the city has already seen a ripple effect from his prize. I sailed up a storm-hit Bosphorus with writers from 30 countries during the inaugural Istanbul Tanpinar literary festival in November. Run by Nermin Mollaoglu of the dynamic literary agency Kalem, and coinciding with Istanbul's book fair, this is the city's first international writers' festival, and aims to feed a growing interest abroad in writing from Turkey. It is named after a dead Turkish novelist and poet whose resuscitated reputation owes much to Pamuk's praise.

Books of the decade: Your best books of 2004

Why I never became a poet Jonathan Jones - As a Welshman, poetry was in my soul - until the editor of a poetry magazine poured cold water on my efforts - So, the Turner prize award is coming up, and it will be presented by the poet laureate. Which reminds me of my adolescent desire to be a poet. Perhaps most teenagers want to be poets, or at least songwriters, but if you're Welsh it's different. Wales is a bardic culture. Its cultural tradition is profoundly invested in the lineage of bards - oral poets - going back through the early middle ages and the Mabinogion into the mists of time. Writing poetry, in other words, seemed a very natural thing to do in north Wales and even, in some sense, a career aspiration or vocation – although I always wanted to write in English.