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At sunset

Language and literature run in poet Andrew Johnston's family. His father was an English lecturer and his grandfather a newspaperman. After 10 years in France, Johnston has come home and published a new book, Sol, which includes "The Sunflower", a long, impressive elegy to his father.

By Lindsay Rabbitt In Culture

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24th March, 2007
In 1995, Andrew Johnston had an epiphany on a street corner in New York. "I came to the realisation," he says, "that I enjoyed being in the world a lot. I realised that whatever fears I had of somewhere like New York, the big bad city, were pretty much ludicrous, and that I loved being there." Johnston was in the US doing the three-month International Writing Programme in Iowa, and an encounter there was the catalyst for him to continue "living in the big wide world". He met Christine Lorre, a Frenchwoman doing her PhD thesis on writer Clark Blaise, the director of the programme. They ...

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