Michael Symmons Roberts, Anne Carson and Daljit Nagra are among the lineup for this year's £15,000 prize

Alexis Soloski: The poet's trilogy about the house of Atreus lacks the austerity of Aeschylus and highlights the tricky business of adapting classic verse plays

Julia Copus's collections include The Shuttered Eye (1995), which won an Eric Gregory Award and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for best first collection, and In Defence of Adultery (2003). Both collections are Poetry Book Society recommendations. In 2001 she received writing awards from the Arts Council of England and the Authors' Foundation, and the following year was one of six writers awarded a BBC/Gulbenkian Foundation writer's bursary. Take a look at her exercise on distance and description.

A life in writing: Anne Carson's poems might be wilfully obscure and difficult, but their compelling storytelling quality has earned her both critical and commercial success.

Emily Wilson on Sappho

Writers respond to Robert Potts's attack on the T S Eliot prize