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Articles by Sam Riviere
DOPPELGÄNGER | Kirkus Reviews
An inventive and challenging fable offering a dark, entirely human, alternative to AI’s destructive capabilities. Near future institutions change how art is made and judged, leaving nascent artists with new and sometimes strange paths to success. Sometimes objects that have lost their everyday purpose become fetishized—like fountain pens—and in Riviere’s new novel, that’s what happens to creative writing.
Literary Festival 2013: New Media and the Future of Literacy
Some people have been struck by the aphoristic potential of Twitter. Others see developments in new media as bringing the era of the literature to an end. This panel will explore the way new media impacts on traditional literary and philosophical forms of writing and reading. One question is about the *threat* of new media to classical literacy: fragmentation and overload in new media leading to the withering away of traditional literary, philosophical and poetic forms.
‘Anybody there?’: A Poem by Sam Riviere
Each month, we publish an original poem, written in response to a work of contemporary art. This month, Sam Riviere chose works from Ed Atkins (2025) atTate Britain. Language lies at the heart of Ed Atkins’s CGI videos and performances. Digital avatars ramble and moan in liminal rendered spaces; protagonists modelled on Atkins himself perform musical pieces; uncanny faces and sounds recur like ghosts. A question runs throughout the exhibition: who is really there? Anybody there?
Poet, novelist, and publisher Sam Riviere on keeping work and play separate
Poet, novelist, and publisher Sam Riviere discusses teaching, avoiding categorizing your art as "work," and having a snooze as praxis. Writing, Poetry, Day jobs, Education, Beginnings, Inspiration Part of: Creating your own opportunities Getting an education Having a day job Highlights on Are you a writer with a routine? Do you write a certain amount every day? When I’m trying to write a novel, yes, to an extent.
Glastonbury to Take Year Off in 2026, Emily Eavis Confirms
Glastonbury festival will not take place in 2026, organiser Emily Eavis has confirmed. Eavis had previously suggested that the festival would soon take its occasional fallow year and confirmed that it would be in 2026 in comments given to the its in-house newspaper, Glastonbury Free Press, this past weekend. The fallow year will give the farm land’s site a year to rest in order to limit damage to the green fields.
Sam Riviere · Poem: ‘Waters of Leith’
Your voice was already inside, picturing winters to come with the confiding agent from the vantage of a summer evening – the small garden for a white cat to lie in, low-ceilinged rooms with slopes of snow or sun, a black, chuntering stove. I saw obstacles at every turn, the box room blocked with boxes, a widower’s kitchen, the bathless bathroom.
Dead Souls - Books from Scotland
By Sam Riviere ‘I first heard about Solomon Wiese on a bright, blustery day on the South Bank…’ Later that evening, at the bar of the Travelodge near Waterloo Bridge, our unnamed narrator will encounter that very same Solomon Wiese. In a conversation that lasts until morning, he will hear Solomon Wiese’s story of his spectacular fall from grace. A story about a scandal that has shaken the literary world and an accusation of serial plagiarism.
The Poetry Society: Poems
“We’ve discovered Superman’s address, and got to the bottom of the wing-beat rate a beetle needs to stay dry in the rain, all of which brings to mind the last stand of a certain man on this very field, what, sixteen years since, is it Greg?
Sam Riviere · Poem: ‘David as an Ape’ · LRB 11 October 2021
In memoriam D.C. Berman So he could be less pained, perusing his library of fleas as his antique gaze brushes everyone in the audience once – even you – placid, bland, then on to some untelegraphed point without, the jungle glow: a tremolo arm bent lagoonwards. His fingers, thick as bottlenecks, crowfooted like sofa leather, pinch fur, know bough and scruff but never ash or maple, fretted and strung, never a rope.
In Defense of Poetic Plagiarism
It’s hardly original to point out that forms of copying are foundational to creativity. Even pointing out that this is not original is not original. And making the same point using exclusively the language of others, edited slightly for consistency, also wouldn’t be original. Still, it bears repeating.
Rain Delay - The Poetry Society
“We’ve discovered Superman’s address, and got to the bottom of the wing-beat rate a beetle needs to stay dry in the rain, all of which brings to mind the last stand of a certain man on this very field, what, sixteen years since, is it Greg?
Dead Souls
Toni Frissell: Weeki Wachee spring, Florida, 1947 My recital of Zariyah Zhadan’s poetry lasted twenty-five minutes, during which time I was able to remain more or less oblivious of the audience, invisible in the near total darkness and silence that appeared like a curtain in front of the wide, bare stage, its only features a pair of spotlit lecterns, the one to my left occupied, it seemed to me, by Zariyah Zhadan’s accusatory absence.
Book World: It's a 300-page paragraph that's unputdownable
"Dead Souls," by the English writer Sam Riviere, is hard to stop reading because it's written as a single paragraph almost 300 pages long. Never in my life have I so missed the little periodic indentations of ordinary prose. It felt like wandering around the mall for six days looking for a place to sit down. But the structure is not the most daunting aspect of Riviere's novel.
You Say Plagiarism. I Say Provocation.
Fiction May 18, 2021 DEAD SOULS By Sam Riviere Sam Riviere’s debut novel, “Dead Souls,” depicts a fantastical, alternate-world version of London in which poetry has become the city’s major cultural product. (“There were rich poets,” we read incredulously.) But the capital’s ascendant literary scene is embroiled in scandal.
Review | ‘Dead Souls’ is a witty, sharp, cruel critique of literary culture. But it’s not for everyone.
“Dead Souls,” by the English writer Sam Riviere, is hard to stop reading because it’s written as a single paragraph almost 300 pages long. Never in my life have I so missed the little periodic indentations of ordinary prose. It felt like wandering around the mall for six days looking for a place to sit down. But the structure is not the most daunting aspect of Riviere’s novel.
Reading List: October 2014
The Reading List is a feature of Poetry magazine’s Editors’ Blog. This month contributors to the October issue share some books that held their interest. Liz Berry I became a mom for the first time earlier this year and I’ve loved reading poems which explore experiences of motherhood in its many forms.
From “The Epigrams of Martial” by Sam Riviere
6. A rabbit hides in the wheel arch on a flight to hawaii and arrives alive a poem stops a tank long enough for a picture to be taken I myself have become more fearful of heights the question is then what happens the eye of jupiter is growing smaller but also colder 7.
On Sylvia Plath's 'Fever 103°'
From the birth of her daughter to a cut thumb, moments described in Sylvia Plath’s letters become those that enliven her poems. The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume II: 1956–1963 sheds new light on the composition of many of Plath’s Ariel poems. In the case of ‘Fever 103°’, Plath’s correspondence with Paul and Clarissa Roche chronicles the poem’s development.
Is it essential to see a painting in the flesh?
Our preconceptions prevent us from truly seeing an artwork, even when we stand before it, says poet Sam Riviere. Last year I visited New York for the first time, a city synonymous with its galleries. Over a long, rainy Saturday in the Met, I was struck by one painting: Caravaggio’s The Holy Family with the Infant St John the Baptist (1602-04), and spent a while trying to work out why. At first it was Mary’s oddly averted gaze, but then, I thought, it was her age.
Literary Festival 2013: New Media and the Future of Literacy
Recorded on 2 March 2013 at Wolfson Theatre, New Academic Building Some people have been struck by the aphoristic potential of Twitter. Others see developments in new media as bringing the era of the literature to an end. This panel will explore the way new media impacts on traditional literary and philosophical forms of writing and reading.
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