Andrew Motion
Something old made new: The Iliad in Emily Wilson’s muscular and moving new translation, the first by a woman, is truly what it claims to be – a version for our time (Norton, £30). And something new made immediate: Hannah Sullivan’s second collection of poems, Was It For This (Faber, £12.99), ambitiously extends the already considerable range of her first book, Three Poems. She’s the cleverest poet of her generation and also one of the most deep-feeling.
Clare Mulley
Vulnerability, strength and defiance this year, starting with Daniel Finkelstein’s Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad (William Collins, £25), which caught me up in its humanity as it testified to the importance of bearing witness to extremism. Frank McDonough provides an authoritative and immensely readable guide to the fractured Weimar Republic, along with a lesson on the vulnerability of democracies, in The Weimar Years (Apollo, £35), the prequel to his two-volume The Hitler Years.
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