Intimate handwritten manuscripts, letters and notebooks as well as rare first editions of books from the British Library are paired with the National Portrait Gallery’s outstanding collection of author portraits.

From William Shakespeare to Zadie Smith, Writers Revealed features over 70 poets, novelists and academics. Each short profile – which provides insight into the writers’ inspirations, struggles, and working practices – is beautifully illustrated with a portrait and manuscript.

Readers will enjoy in-depth encounters with some of the world’s most famous writers, including James Joyce, Bernardine Evaristo, Virginia Woolf, Bram Stoker, Jane Austen, Benjamin Zephaniah, and Angela Carter, and discover just what it is that makes these individuals so endlessly compelling.

Manuscripts shown here range from John Keats’ drafts in his own hand, to poems written on toilet paper by Sylvia Pankhurst while confined in Holloway Prison, to early versions typed by Sylvia Plath on the reverse of Ted Hughes’ own discarded work.

Themed chapters allow for fascinating new comparisons between diverse objects – William Blake’s ‘London’ (1794) sits alongside Andrew Salkey’s ‘Jamaica’ (1973) in discussions of place – revealing how each manuscript has shaped our understanding and practice of poetry today.

Experts from the British Library explain the process and provenance behind poems from the UK and Europe, North America, Asia and the Middle East, highlighting the secrets that published poems often conceal.

Previously unpublished early drafts by practicing poets including Benjamin Zephaniah, Simon Armitage, Pascale Petit and Hollie McNish are accompanied by new reflections from the poets themselves on their inspiration and craft.

Featured poets include: Oscar Wilde, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, John Betjeman, W. B. Yeats, Maya Angelou, Fujiwara no Teika, Emily Dickinson, Ted Hughes, T. S. Eliot, Christina Rossetti, Seamus Heaney, Rudyard Kipling, James Berry, Robert Burns, Sylvia Plath.