AustLit

'I went with my sister to a reading by Wendy Cope. We had to pay the best part of 10 to get in and the large room was so packed we couldn't claim our seats in the front. That's how big Wendy Cope is in British poetry. Her Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis has so far sold 185,000 copies! Good on her. The reading proved to be, not as I had thought, the launch of another book of show-stopping poems. Life, Love and the Archers is prose, published and unpublished, and very good it was. Her style is ineffable, her content always interesting. The Archers, by the way is a radio soap about farmers. Larkin listened to it too. It has recently gone off rather and is now a radio Home and Away.' (Publication abstract)