UK Poetry Sales Soar!

Millennials have been blamed for killing industry upon industry. But in the UK, a new study is crediting millennials for advancing one industry near and dear to our hearts—poetry! As this NEA study from last year shows, the trend toward an increase in poetry readership and engagement has grown on this side of the pond as well. More from The Guardian on UK poetry trends:

A passion for politics, particularly among teenagers and young millennials, is fuelling a dramatic growth in the popularity of poetry, with sales of poetry books hitting an all-time high in 2018.

Statistics from UK book sales monitor Nielsen BookScan show that sales grew by just over 12% last year, for the second year in a row. In total, 1.3m volumes of poetry were sold in 2018, adding up to £12.3m in sales, a rise of £1.3m on 2017. Two-thirds of buyers were younger than 34 and 41% were aged 13 to 22, with teenage girls and young women identified as the biggest consumers last year.

Rupi Kaur, a 26-year-old Canadian poet with 3.4 million followers on Instagram, leads the bestsellers list and was responsible for almost £1m of sales. “You tell me to quiet down / cause my opinions make me less beautiful,” she writes in Milk and Honey, the No 1 bestselling collection of 2018, “but I was not made with a fire in my belly / so I could be put out.”

Works by Leonard Cohen, John Cooper Clarke, Seamus Heaney, Carol Ann Duffy and Homer also sold well.

Read on at The Guardian.