For as long as Christmas has been celebrated, poets and writers have sought to explore every aspect of it, whether the story of the Nativity, gatherings with family and friends, or the festive traditions that have grown over the centuries.

A Literary Christmas is a seasonal anthology collecting poems, short stories and prose extracts by some of the greatest poets and writers in the English language. Like Charles Dickens’s ghosts of Christmas past and present, these texts represent times old and new – from John Donne’s Elizabethan hymn to the baby Jesus to Rudyard Kipling’s Christmas in India, from Thomas Tusser counting the cost of a Tudor feast to P. G. Wodehouse’s wry short story about Christmas on a diet.

Authors also include: Jane Austen, George Eliot, G. K. Chesterton, D. H. Lawrence, Emily Brontë, Thomas Hardy, Christina Rossetti, Samuel Pepys, Anthony Trollope, and Benjamin Zephaniah.