Hay Festival Book Club - January 2024
The Orange and Other Poems by Wendy Cope
A selection of Wendy Cope’s most beloved poems to offer inspiration and comfort for the new year, The Orange and other poems blends laugh-out-loud funny with the deeply moving.
From the joy of falling in love to ways to help you deal with a painful break-up or the memories of people loved and lost, this is a book you will want to savour and share with all your friends.
My heart has made its mind up
And I’m afraid it’s you.
Read it? Let us know what you think on TikTok, X, Facebook and Instagram using #HFBookClub.
Further reading
How The Orange made Wendy Cope the internet’s favourite poet, Independent
About the author
Wendy Cope was born in Erith, Kent. After university she worked for fifteen years as a primary-school teacher in London. Her first collection of poems, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, was published in 1986 with subsequent collections including Serious Concerns (1992); If I Don’t Know (2001); Two Cures for Love: Selected Poems 1979–2006 (2008); Family Values (2011); Christmas Poems (2017); and Anecdotal Evidence (2018). She is the author of the prose collection Life, Love and the Archers (2015) and two books for children, Twiddling Your Thumbs (1988) and The River Girl (1991), and the editor of numerous anthologies, including, The Faber Book of Bedtime Stories (1999). Cope has received a Cholmondeley Award and a Michael Braude Award for Light Verse from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2010, she was awarded an Order of the British Empire.
About Hay Festival Book Club
Timeless titles to offer you a break from the day to day. Can't decide what to read next? Follow your curiosity and join Hay Festival on a journey to imagine the world anew through great literature. Unconstrained by genre or form these are our monthly picks of great books worth reading (or re-reading) right now.
Throughout the month, we'll share interesting links and articles relating to our selection on social media using #HFBookClub and invite you all to get involved with your questions and comments. Each selection will also be marked with a free online event.
If you'd like to recommend a book for consideration, get in touch via bookclub@hayfestival.org.
Happy reading!