Hay Festival January Book Club – The Orange and other poems by Wendy Cope

 – Free Online

Join the internet’s favourite poet Wendy Cope as she presents her latest collection, The Orange and other poems. 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.

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!

Hay Festival January Book Club – The Orange and other poems by Wendy Cope
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Buy the book for this event

The Orange and other poems

My heart has made its mind up
And I'm afraid it's you.

The Orange provides the perfect introduction to Wendy Cope, one of Britain's wittiest, best-selling and best-loved poets.

In poems that can turn from laugh-out-loud funny to deeply moving, Wendy Cope offers reflections on love and life. From the joy of falling - and being - 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.

'Wendy Cope's readership, numerous and adoring, is the envy of most poets. Cope's real strength lies not in charm or insight (she has buckets of both) but in the pitch perfect exactitude of her writing.' Sunday Times
Price: £8.99