The Editors

J.H. Prynne died on Wednesday at the age of 89, after a prolific life as a teacher and essayist, a loyal friend to his students and, above all, a poet of great stature whose remains will not be transferred to Westminster Abbey. The landscape of English poetry changed after the publication of Prynne’s second book, Kitchen Poems, in 1968. His later writing found a wide, eclectic readership. There were opaque, exquisite experiments in lyric, on the one hand, and on the other, long, argumentative pieces, densely intuitive, often obscure, inviting readers to consider how the poem was supposed to address the world, if it could rise to the occasion. 

Tony Harrison died last week at the age of 88. The LRB published nearly thirty of his poems, from v. in January 1985 to ‘Polygons’ in February 2015. He will be much missed.

Fredric Jameson died yesterday at the age of 90. He had taught since 1985 at Duke University. His many books include The Political Unconscious, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism and The Antinomies of Realism (reviewing which, Michael Wood observed that ‘Jameson thinks dialectically in the strong sense, in the way we are all supposed to think but almost no one does’).

As Miranda Carter writes in the current issue of the LRB, more than 2360 episodes of Desert Island Discs are available as podcasts. ‘This audio archive is unique,’ Carter says. ‘Before your ears thousands of famous and no longer famous people talk about themselves. Over seventy years, the language with which we describe ourselves, and expectations about what it’s acceptable to reveal in the public realm, are audibly mapped.’ Some of the programme’s guests have also contributed to the London Review of Books. They include, in chronological order:

Partners in Health, the charity he cofounded in 1987, has announced that Paul Farmer died today in Rwanda. He was a professor of global health at Harvard and an infectious disease physician at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. The most recent of his many books was Fever, Feuds and Diamonds: Ebola and the Ravages of History. He also wrote four pieces for the LRB: on the coup that overthrew Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti; on Ebola (twice); and on global healthcare inequality.