Fiona Larkin’s poem uses Finnish grammar to explore her feelings about her son’s move from the UK to Brisbane

A poem inspired by the writer’s experience missing her son after he moved from the UK to Australia has won this year’s £5,000 National Poetry Competition.

Fiona Larkin’s poem, Absence has a grammar, was picked from nearly 22,000 entries.

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Awarded to writers of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama, 2025’s recipients include novelist Sigrid Nunez, playwright Roy Williams and poet Anthony V Capildeo

The Irish novelist Anne Enright is one of eight writers set to receive $175,000 (£135,000) each in recognition of their life’s work.

American writer Sigrid Nunez was also selected as part of this year’s Windham-Campbell prizes , which each year award $1.4m to writers of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama, with the aim of allowing writers to focus on their work independent of financial concerns.

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One minute Rachel and Phoebe are giving birth, the next they’re perfectly groomed and having coffee with their mates. That’s not a picture I recognise

I’ve started watching this great fantasy series from the mid-90s and early 00s – it’s called Friends . It follows a group of humanoid characters who treat childbirth as a social occasion, wear full makeup postpartum and never look after their babies. The fantasy element is very clever – so subtle in fact that it is only now, watching it decades later, as a parent myself, that I even noticed it.

Perhaps back in the 90s the otherworldly nature of Phoebe Buffay waiting to give birth to triplets in a room chock-full of her wise-cracking friends, despite it being a high-risk pregnancy, was understood. Maybe the way that Ross Geller’s baby Ben is delivered under a sheet, by an obstetrician apparently working blind, was a well-known speculative fiction trope back then. Possibly when it originally aired, parents were simply amazed by the special effects involved when Rachel Green was shown sitting in a coffee shop gossiping about her love life, three weeks after giving birth, in full makeup and blow-dry, high heels, a pair of size 10 jeans – and entirely without her baby. Whatever was going on, no one at the time seemed fazed by this uncanny valley where babies breastfeed just once in their life, never get ill and are put behind glass in hospital nurseries to be glanced at by visiting relatives who then have sex in cupboards.

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Disney’s controversial live-action remake was proportionally more successful in ‘red’ states that vote Republican than those voting Democrat

Dogged by politically inspired controversy for months, Disney’s new version of Snow White recorded a disappointing $43m (£33.3m) on its first weekend at the North American box office, the lowest figures to date for one of the studio’s recent wave of live-action remakes of its classic animated films. However, despite the stream of criticism over its so-called “woke” credentials, figures reveal that it is proportionally more successful in “red” states that vote Republican than those voting Democrat.

Overall, Snow White’s figures are well down on what Disney may have hoped for; the previously worst performing remake was the Tim Burton-directed Dumbo, which took $45m on its opening weekend in 2019, and finished with a worldwide box-office take of $353m. In contrast, remade films such as Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King all took over $1bn worldwide.

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He was in one of the biggest groups in the world – all without playing a note. As the last surviving Monkee turns 80, he remembers 60s fame – and what happened when the band broke free

In 1965, Micky Dolenz was an architecture student and jobbing actor in Los Angeles, doing the rounds of auditions for TV pilots. As a 10-year-old he had played the lead in a TV series called Circus Boy, but the former child star began to notice something odd about the jobs his agent was now sending him to: every one was for a series “about kids in a band”. He says: “One was called The Happeners, about a little folk trio like Peter, Paul and Mary. One was about a surfing band like the Beach Boys. Another was about a big family folk ensemble. Something was in the air, obviously, because of the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Four Seasons, Motown. Young people, who had disposable income, were being targeted.”

None of those shows got made but a fourth audition proved more fruitful: it called for “folk’n’roll musician/singers … four insane boys” who looked as if they might hang around a hip Sunset Strip coffee shop called Ben Frank’s . Dolenz got a leading role, happily acquiescing to learn to play drums. “It was kind of the same as when I was in Circus Boy and they told me I had to learn to ride an elephant – ‘Great! When do I start?’”

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Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, Cardif
The pianist captured the vast dynamic contrasts of Schubert’s sonatas; and her fine playing of William Byrd was a refreshing foil

Two Schubert sonatas were the main works framing Mishka Rushdie Momen’s programme in the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama’s Steinway series. Given that both were in the minor mode – the A minor, D784 and the C minor, D958 – together they constituted quite a serious, heavyweight affair for a Sunday morning recital.

A pianist of graceful poise and sensitivity, Momen has a highly fluent technique that allowed everything to carry well in this acoustic. And, despite seeming a slight slip of a thing, to use an old-fashioned phrase, in these sonatas she showed that she could unleash considerable power in Schubert’s outbursts of high-volume dramatic tension, sometimes shocking in their immediacy. At the other extreme, her pianissimo was often pianississimo, so that lyrical lines, rather than quietly singing out, sounded understated and as a result curiously underwhelming. It was in the mercurial finale of the A minor sonata and the lilting, dance-like F major theme with its chromatic edge, poignant and piquant at every appearance, that Momen captured most expressively the happy/sad ambivalence of this composer’s musical makeup.

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The cast of the new BBC show explain how they have given hard-hitting content a fun, relatable and colourful spin to actively encourage teenagers to make good life choices

In a modern academy secondary school in a deprived part of Leeds, adults wrangle a group of children into their places and a hush descends, before a director calls “Action!”

It’s a Tuesday in May – but it is not a school day. The kids have come in during the holidays to be extras in a new BBC comedy drama, Crongton, set on a fictional housing estate.

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‘I had no idea I’d get so wet. I was in water for a month. It was kind of wild. For the storm scenes, they were dumping it down on us from towers. There were big-ass waves flying everywhere’

I’d always wanted to be killed in a movie by something big that was chasing me. I missed out on my death scene in Jurassic Park because a hurricane destroyed the set in Hawaii, so I never got to go down and get eaten by a velociraptor. When Renny Harlin told me he was making a horror movie with killer sharks, and that I was going to be the first person to die, I said: “Great!” It was a good idea – once he’d killed me, it meant any character’s life was up for grabs.

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The director was discussing the row over Adrien Brody’s AI-enhanced Hungarian accent, saying ‘we mess with actors’ voices all the time’

David Cronenberg has suggested the AI controversy over Adrien Brody’s Hungarian accent in The Brutalist was an issue manufactured by the campaign of a rival Oscar film.

Cronenberg was speaking at the London Soundtrack festival alongside composer Howard Shore, and in remarks reported by the Hollywood Reporter, said that film-makers “mess with actors’ voices all the time”. Cronenberg said: “There was a discussion about Adrien Brody … [and] apparently they used artificial intelligence to improve his accent. I think it was a campaign against The Brutalist by some other Oscar nominees. It’s very much a Harvey Weinstein kind of thing, though he wasn’t around.”

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