Poetry sales in the UK are soaring, thanks to Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey. Figures released by NielsenIQ BookScan show that its Poetry Texts & Poetry Anthologies product class has earned just above £8m in the first 30 weeks of 2026 through BookScan’s Total Consumer Market (TCM), which is 13.3% up against the same period last year.
The Bookseller reports that Homer has been a big part of this, thanks to Nolan’s blockbuster which has conquered the global box office this summer and, arguably, the cultural discourse. But the historical versifier is not the whole story.
‘Strip out The Odyssey and The Iliad from the 2026 and 2025 charts’. the magazine notes, ‘and Poetry Texts & Poetry Anthologies is still up 7.2% – and would still almost certainly be cruising for a record year.
Though Homer is doing very well, his 2026 TCM takings already exceed his personal best annual high-water mark of £871,000 set last year. Not bad for someone whose very existence has been debated by scholars for centuries. At any rate, by 2026’s end Homer may break the single-year TCM poet sales record, set by “Instapoet” Rupi Kaur in 2017 with £1.2m.
