'A fresh, impressive new translation of The Divine Comedy that is both easy-going and lucid' Best Books of 2013, Sunday Times

The Divine Comedy is the precursor of modern literature, and Clive James's new translation - his life's work and decades in the making - presents Dante's entire epic as a whole, unified, and compulsively readable lyric poem.

For Dante, the dramatic human stories of Hell were exciting, but the spiritual studies of Purgatory and the sublime panoramas of Heaven were no less so. In his incantatory new version, James - defying the convention by writing in quatrains - creates a striking and hugely accessible translation that reproduces the same wonderful momentum of the original Italian and propels the reader along the pilgrim's path from Hell to Heaven, from despair to revelation.

'Wonderfully unstuffy and injects fresh life back into the poem' Mary Beard, Books of the Year 2013, Observer

'An extraordinary verse-rendering . . . The result is a revelation' Robert McCrum, Guardian

'An outstanding achievement . . . Clive James has now given us a translation worthy of this and any other time; and a great piece of literature in its own right' Evening Standard

Clive James is the author of more than forty books. As well as verse and novels, he has published collections of essays, literary criticism, television criticism and travel writing, plus five volumes of autobiography. In 1992 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia, and in 2003 he was awarded the Philip Hodgins memorial medal for literature.

His other poetry collections include Collected Poems, Angels Over Elsinore, Opal Sunset and Sentenced to Life, and he is also the author of a verse commentary on Proust, Gate of Lilacs.