Robin Robertson and Glyn Maxwell will be doing readings as part of Poetry @ The Print Room

THE COMING GOD 

after Nonnus 

Horned child, double-born into risk, guarded

by satyrs, centaurs, raised

by the nymphs of Nysa, by the Hyades:

here he was, the toddler, Dionysus.

He cried ‘Daddy!’ stretching up to the sky, and he was right

and clever, because the sky was Zeus

his father, reaching down. 

Qais Akbar Omar was born in 1982. He is a gifted linguist who trained as a journalist and as a translator for the US military and the UN. A Fort of Nine Towers, which will be published by Picador in June 2013, was written in English and will be translated all over the world. 

He's chosen some fantastic books as his favourites, but his answer to the question, 'What gives you nightmares?' casts everything else into the shadows.

Emma Donoghue is the bestselling author of Room and more recently of a wonderful collection of short stories, Astray. Read on for reading tips a-plenty.

This year we published Suzette Field's A Curious Invitation: The Forty Greatest Parties in Literature. Parties are at the heart of literature, they're where the drama happens; this book is a compendium of who was there, what they wore, what was eaten and who said what to whom. In tribute to all the festivities in the book, we've asked our authors to tell us a little about their best parties, real and fictional.