On Monday night, Sarah Howe brilliantly confounded many expectations by winning the T.S. Eliot Prize for 2015 with her collection, Loop of Jade (Chatto and Windus, 2015). Not only was Howe the first Asian poet to win the prize, hers was also the first debut collection to do so, coming first among a shortlist of heavyweights including Don Paterson, Claudia Rankine, and Sean O’Brien.

Perhaps inevitably, Howe’s work was immediately described through the prism of her identity as a young British Asian woman. Speaking to the Guardian, the poet Pascale Petit – who chaired the panel of judges – praised Howe’s work for “exploring the situation of women in China”, and for speaking to “the status of women in the world”. Certainly, Howe’s writing was also rightly lauded for its stylistic strengths, for its richness and erudition. But there was no escaping the sense that here was a different, global author, one who had given voice to “a culture we are not used to seeing in British poetry.”

What does it mean to be an Asian, English-language writer in Britain? Till I moved here in 2013, I had never thought of myself as an Asian, even a Chinesewriter. I had come from a young country where contours of writing are made by a shape-shifting landscape, where writers grapple often with the shadow of the state, and where classroom debates on ‘Singaporean literature’ centre on what the term even means. Coming to Oxford, I began to hear my work described in the language of arrival: I was now a minority writer, visiting the cradle of empire, responding to a history I could not claim.

There is no single answer to that question. Howe has plumbed the depths of this particular identity, among a multitude of others, by working within a language too often seen as flatly ‘colonial’ – a language she gracefully, truthfully inhabits. Like me, Howe comes from a Chinese-majority island that, until recently, has been a British colony. But similarities only extend so far. Unlike me, Howe grew up in England, went to Cambridge, and now lives and works across the Atlantic. Her poetry not only reveals a grasp of Chinese languages and cultures, but also reaches with dexterity for Roethke, Classical mythology, and the Bible. One of my favourite pieces from the collection, Banderole, is a meditation on history and etymology that utterly transcends its European earth.

If we are to see our poets through the lens of their lives – and I believe there is a strong case for doing so – let us take it all in. Much more matters than just their colour, gender, class, or education, though these may stand out, in our place and time, as categories that we identify with and struggle for. Each poet inhabits a separate universe, expressed in totality through language, and this is precisely what enables poetry to speak with such intimacy across all the borders we could possibly imagine.

In the aftermath of David Bowie’s death on Sunday, January 10, the internet has exploded with various articles on his life, his lasting effect on nearly all aspects of modern pop culture, and his most recent and final album Blackstar, which came out only two days before the artist succumbed to liver cancer, a disease he had been battling for over a year. Most articles written about Bowie focus on his ability to vacillate between and combine music styles within the same song and to immerse himself in various characters of his own creation. The BBC, as well as other publications over the artist’s more than forty year career, has taken to calling him a musical “chameleon” after one of his own songs, while the Guardian has released a plethora of articles covering nearly every aspect of his personal and professional life, and The New Yorker has taken a much more sentimental look at Bowie’s own personal character.

While Bowie certainly did have a knack for recreating genres and taking sounds and styles he heard to new extremes, it is sometimes taken for granted that there really was just one man at the root of all these performances and characters, and perhaps that’s how Bowie himself preferred things. In his early career, Bowie, or David Jones as he was originally known, struggled to find one set group of musicians that he could cooperate with creatively before finally deciding to present himself as a soloist, which is how he has remained in public perception ever since, despite the numerous duets and brief experimentations with more group-oriented collaborations.

As a child he quickly took to any sort of artistic effort, playing various instruments from the piano to the ukulele, and immersing himself in dance. The thought of a young Bowie striving to achieve stardom through whatever mode possible brings to my mind something Johnny Depp said about a year ago now at a film premiere where he called the idea of actor-musician crossovers “a sickening thing,” despite the fact that he himself dabbles in music. Depp may, however, have had in mind the series of Disney Channel actors and actresses that had transformed into pop stars after their sitcoms’ main constituent of viewers had aged out of the Disney fan base, rather than figures like Bowie. Regardless, David Bowie’s various forays into different fields of performance, especially at a time when modern art itself was swiftly disengaging from the dogmas of genre, speaks more to his own expansive capabilities than it does to any hungry pursuit of fame and fortune.

What has most struck me about David Bowie’s character, after watching what amounts to only a handful of the numerous clips from his interviews available online, is the difference in the way that Bowie interacted with the press as compared to the clips we see of celebrities being interviewed today. While it has become common practice to closely examine the quality of the line of questioning directed at performers in recent years (Recall, for example, the response to that painfully awkward interview with Cara Delevigne last year), artists have been dealing with dismissive, baiting, and sometimes just plain rude interviewers since at least the mid-twentieth century. Despite his loud costumes and vibrant on-stage presence, Bowie comes across as shy and aloof during most of his interviews, even during one conducted in 1964 regarding his involvement in the “Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long Haired Men” as a teenager. Although the artist seems to have become a bit more open to discussing his own personal feelings in addition to his music, revealing to an interviewer at the BBC in 2002 how shaken he was by the World Trade Centre attacks in New York and that he has an “orientation towards the apocalyptic,” Bowie still seemed to take a certain delight in contradicting all of his interviewer’s attempts to analyse the meaning of his new collection of songs.  

In the coming years, fans and rock history scholars (surely there must be a degree for that somewhere), having been freed from the potential for rebuke from the man himself, will try even harder than before to break into the psyche of this rock legend, potentially altering the legacy that Bowie left behind. In some ways, Bowie’s newest album seems to preempt any attempts to co-opt his life story, though thus far it has only led to further speculation. It’s safe to assume that the artist would be happy to know that people will continue to enjoy and be awed by his music for generations to come, but his work has also always seemed to be more of a project in personal improvement, with Bowie striving constantly to best his own creativity and stretch the boundaries of conventionality, rather than an effort to reveal himself to the public. Perhaps then the best way to listen to his music, and his new album in particular, is not to listen with judgment about what each lyric or chord signifies, but rather just to listen and appreciate.

• Let’s start with the obvious. The Golden Globes. They kind of function as the Oscars’ maitre d’, guiding all the big names to their metaphorical tables of cinematic success, and letting everyone know who probably needs to make sure they’re wearing semi-practical frockery on next month’s most famous red carpet. Here’s looking at you, Jennifer Lawrence. The idea is, if you get a nod or a gong at the Globes, it’s seventy percent certain you’re going to end up in exactly the same category, or winning exactly the same trophy, at the Academy Awards next month (bugger for the thirty percent who get their Globes as consolation prizes, but hey — it has to happen, and at least you get something shiny this year). Notable winners were Lawrence (as per usual) for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy, Brie Larson for Best Actress in a Motion Picture, Kate Winslet for Best Supporting Actress and The Revenant for Best Drama Motion Picture. Writing’s on the Wall scooped the expected but possibly undeserved Best Original Song trophy. The most exciting win (at least, I think so) was Ennio Morricone’s Best Score award, accepted on the elderly maestro’s behalf by Quentin Tarantino. Please let this mean that the musical genius is back in the Hollywood fold. But, of course, everyone’s more interested in… yup, you guessed it, Leonardo DiCaprio. Is he in the running? Is he? Finally? Well, he nimbly picked up the Best Actor gong for his turn in The Revenant (which, along with Bridge of Spies, looks set to be this year’s biggie). But, ya know. They’ve teased us like this before. PLEASE, ACADEMY GODS. PLEASE JUST PUT THE WORLD OUT OF ITS COLLECTIVE MISERY AND GIVE LEO A SHINY GOLD MAN ALREADY. We’ll know a bit more on Thursday, when the Oscar shortlists are announced.

• Speaking of Jennifer Lawrence, and her all round talent / affable precocity, the twentysomething serial award-snatcher looks set to team up with yet another costar old enough to be her… well, I don’t know, but it’s Javier Bardem, and I have fewer problems with this than I apparently should have as a Good Woman; because yes, there’s a major issue of implicit imbalance in an industry where a young woman can’t find a decent actor within her own age bracket, but also – hello! It’s Javier Bardem. He’s phenomenal. Should Bardem join her (it’s as yet unconfirmed he definitely has the gig), they’re going to be working under the watchful eye of none other than writer-director Darren Aronofsky, according to Variety; and therefore I can only have high hopes that this will be a gilded masterclass in all-round good (and deliciously eccentric) cinema. Awaiting with limited patience.

• If, and I can only say if, Guillermo del Toro really does end up working with James Cameron on Cameron’s recently proposed collaboration, I can only hazard a guess at the weird and wonderful, crazy lunacy of genius filmmaking that will result. Cameron is reportedly getting del Toro on board for a remake of a 1966 movie, Fantastic Voyage. Just listen to this premise: “a bunch of scientists and a submarine are shrunken to atomic size and injected into the body of a scientist whose life is under threat” (thanks, Empire). Now, picture del Toro’s very particular aesthetic, as demonstrated in Pan’s Labyrinth and Crimson Peak. Now, imagine what this film’s canvas probably demands: internal organs brought to life as a kind of gothic architecture, rapid rivers of blood, massive globules, the human body its very own derelict fortress. It’ll be Hellboy meets Holby City. I’m such a sick person. I really, really hope this gets off the ground. 

After watching the New Years Day special of Sherlock, I tried to imagine what went through Mark Gatiss’ and Stephen Moffat’s heads as they wrote the last sentence of their script. Rubbing their hands, I imagine, Gatiss might have leaned over and whispered seductively in Moffat’s ear (it is my head, no judgement) ‘those kids are going to be AMAZED. So are those women. It was a dream… a feminist dream.’

And perhaps, if no one had ever seen Sherlock or Dr Who before, The Matrix or Inception, our minds might have really been blown. As it was, Sherlock’s attempt to escape the ‘Mind Palace’ conceit felt eerily reminiscent of the Doctor’s fear of being forever trapped in his Confession Dial. It’s all getting a bit predictable. 

To briefly summarise the plot: Sherlock and Watson meet in Victorian England and decide to share a flat at 221b Baker street. Together they work to solve the mystery of the ‘Abominable Bride’, a woman who committed suicide, but seemingly rose from the dead to kill her husband and several other dastardly men. Sherlock and Watson eventually discover that the woman faked her death, and that the ghostly effects were achieved by a series of optical illusions, with the aid of a group of co-conspirators. The conspirators are in fact a group of women campaigning for suffrage, and Sherlock allows them to continue murdering the dastardly men because their cause is ultimately just. However, as the episode progresses a couple of clues reveal that the Victorian World cannot be real. Various anachronisms creep in, as Mycroft declares that ‘the virus is in the data’, and Sherlock mis-genders the murder victim. We come to learn that the entire Victorian episode is only an imaginative space of Sherlock’s mind palace, to which he has retreated to meditate on whether Moriarty, his Arch Nemesis who had previously killed himself and framed Sherlock for his murder, has faked his own death. After exorcising his demons in a scene by the Reichenbach Falls, Sherlock wakes up in the present day, and concludes that Moriarty could not have faked his own death, and is in fact dead after all. Or is he? 

Some of the episode was brilliant: like Mrs Hudson’s refusal to speak in protest of the small part she plays in Watson’s accounts of their adventures, or when Watson grows a moustache, supposedly in the attempt to keep up with the illustrator. Sherlock has always been characterised by wonderful exuberance and titillating dialogue. The relationship between Mycroft and Sherlock was, as always, brilliantly characterised, as Mycroft steadily eats himself to death just to beat Sherlock in a bet. Basically, the episode was fantastic while it remained a self-enclosed Victorian special, leaving the audience to draw parallels between the Victorian entities and their modern day counterparts. Moffatt studied English as an undergraduate, and there is a lot in his script that can be recognised as typical English student flaws: a fascination with theory and the ‘meta’, which can eventually lead an essay, or in this case a TV show, over the edge of self-indulgence. Self-indulgence, that is, encapsulated by Sherlock crying ‘elementary dear Watson’ as he throws himself off the Reichenback falls to escape from his ‘Mind Palace’. 

As for the cult of Satanic vengeful females, I’m quite divided. Part of me, with my baser film instincts, loves a secret murderous cult as much as the next woman. Certainly the discovery in St Trinian’s II that the world was ruled by a society of patriarchal free masons (true) who were trying to suppress the fact that Shakespeare was actually a woman got me very excited. But Sherlock‘s tone is different. The Ku Klux Klan robes? And the underlying assumption that the feminist movement was started up by a load of bitter, jilted brides? It’s exactly what you would expect from a load of middle-aged men trying to imagine what to role out for the Cumberbitches. 

It’s important to stress that Moffat and Gatiss are Napoleons of the TV world. The first series of Sherlock ranks perhaps with the best television made in my lifetime. Moffat is the man who wrote such Dr Who episodes as ‘Blink’, ‘The Girl in the Fireplace’, and ‘Silence in the Library’. But he now seems to be a victim of his own success, churning out the same stuff over and over again. Together, Moffat and Gatiss have tried to replace good narrative with gimmicks and dreamscapes. It’s time to get back to the fundamentals of plot and character – it’s elementary, Dear Watson.