Rob Reiner - d. December 14th 2025

Met a guy at the Electric Banana
who offered me a part in his movie;
maybe waiting tables, an extra in a
courtroom scene, a lonely novelist.
I asked what he wanted from me;
I want answers, he said. I want truth.

Read about Rob Reiner here

Joanna Trollope – d. December 11th 2025

We are all middlebrow now,
in thrall to he said she said,
the touchable worlds of love,
whether imagined or illicit,
or sometimes even true.
Someone should write this
down; we may be touched by
the significance of small things.

Read about Joanna Trollope here

Stanley Baxter – d. December 11th 2025

Welcome to the extravaganza;
Hollywood in a Glasgow studio,
a man with a thousand voices,
none of them his own, and yet
all of them. Parliamo Tinseltown,
parliamo the lingua franca of joy.

Read about Stanley Baxter here

Sophie Kinsella – d. December 10th 2025

A book is the best way
to travel; a paperback
is a seat in First Class, 
a gold card. Live a life
you could never afford,
where nothing is perfect
but everything balances
at the turn of a final page.

Read about Sophie Kinsella here

Raul Malo – d. December 8th 2025

Wind lifts the tin roof
on a forgotten cantina
down by the border.
A couple dance
by the jukebox.
A voice like añejo
carries over the desert;
please let her know
that I’m well.

Read about Raul Malo here

Frank Gehry – d. December 5th 2025

What if we could make our buildings dance,
screw them up like rejected blueprints, fold
their planes into curves and corrugations?
It might be possible to twist dreams inside out,
and turn these meditations into a metropolis. 

Read about Frank Gehry here

Steve Cropper – d. December 3rd 2025

They put a band together for you -
guitar, bass, drums, keys - tight,
and sharp, all the right moves,
like thunder, lightning, all new
licks made entirely out of light
by the Colonel of the groove.

Read about Steve Cropper here

Billy Bonds – d. November 30th 2025

There is a factory by the Thames
where men are wrought from iron,
a number branded into their back,
a dream of Saturday beaten into
a breastplate with an old hammer.

Read about Billy Bonds here

Tom Stoppard – d. November 29th 2025

There is nothing as dramatic
as an idea; who will speak it?
Who will speak against it?
Who will be changed by it?
The idea sleeps in the pen of
its writer, and only awakens
when it is time to be spoken. 

Read about Tom Stoppard here

Pam Hogg – d. November 26th 2025

This season we’re all in catsuits,
stitched from skins of dead punks
and supermodels, bought from a
boutique on a dead-end street.
We know style moves on; till then
we’ll wear our art on our sleeves.

Read about Pam Hogg here

Jimmy Cliff – d. November 24th 2025

Sit tight and listen keenly;
a sweet sound from the yard,
neither dread nor dancehall,
the sound of the flowing river
we all must cross someday.

Read about Jimmy Cliff here

Gary ‘Mani’ Mounfield – d. November 20th 2025

You lived at ground zero, where
the sound of a city drowned out
every other song in the world,
where a bassline could crumble
suburbs to dust, and to survive
meant you were made of stone.

Read about Mani here

James Watson – d. November 6th 2025

Science is a poem without rules,
a solution to a twisted conundrum.
Inside this poem are the molecules
which make up every other poem,
written, forgotten or yet to come. 

Read about James Watson here

Pauline Collins – d. November 5th 2025

Take this role as a gift in two acts,
your audience willing you to risk
what they never could. Leave them
with your lines ringing: why do we
get all this life if we don’t use it?

Read about Pauline Collins here

Diane Ladd – d. November 3rd 2025

I saw you rouged in a dead man’s gore.
I saw you work the diner. I saw the silence
in your eyes fueling that barbed kindness,
and though you don’t live there anymore,
still I can never rinse away that wildness.

Read about Diane Ladd here

Tcheky Karyo - d. October 31st 2025

I am the prince of melancholy,
my face an unchanging moon,
my voice like low tide. There is
drama in my stillness. You think
you know what I’m thinking?
You will know when I tell you.

Read about Tcheky Karyo here

Peter Watkins - d. October 30th 2025

The content of this Otwituary
has been judged to be too
horrifying for social media;
no firestorms burning through
Home Counties, no fallout, no
looters shot on the street, only
this nightmare, filmed as truth.

Read about Peter Watkins here

Prunella Scales – d. October 27th 2025

I hear a laugh from another room,
the sound of Medusa cross-bred
with a hyena. To see her up close
is to step closer to death; death
by stare, by word, by comic gelding.

Read about Prunella Scales here

 

Tony Adams – d. October 26th 2025

I saw Mephistopheles checking out
of the semi-derelict motel just off
the Kings Oak bypass; moustache,
and sta-prest suit, already on his
third flirtation of the day, recording
each soul in a double-entry ledger.

Read about Tony Adams here

Dave Ball – d. October 22nd 2025

Life is a non-stop cabaret, and this is
the sound of the house band, pitched
somewhere between bliss and blitz,
songs to dance to, songs of despair,
battle-scars of all the good times.

Read about Dave Ball here