A 1,400% jump in UK print sales of Homer's The Odyssey has helped push the country's poetry category toward an all-time high, with market researchers NielsenIQ reporting that poetry sales surpassed £8 million in the first 30 weeks of 2026 — a 13.3% rise on the same period in 2025 (The Guardian).

The surge tracks the release of Christopher Nolan's film adaptation of the epic, which arrived in cinemas in 2026. In the four weeks to 25 July 2026, UK print sales of The Odyssey were up 1,400% compared with the same period a year earlier, according to NielsenIQ (The Guardian). In the United States, print sales across all editions of the poem were up 76% year-to-date, according to Circana BookScan (The Guardian). The WW Norton edition of The Odyssey alone sold 20,721 copies in the UK, generating just over £303,000, as reported by The Bookseller (The Bookseller). That Norton edition is the translation by Emily Wilson, the first woman to render the full poem into English; it has sold more than a million copies since publication (USA Today).

The category is now expected to exceed £15 million in annual UK sales for the first time since accurate records began, and could reach £17 million if momentum holds through autumn (The Guardian). The three years from 2023 to 2025 were already the most lucrative on record for the category, following successive highs set in 2023 and again in 2024 (NielsenIQ).

But the boom is not only about Homer. Even when sales of The Odyssey and The Iliad are stripped from both the 2025 and 2026 figures, the UK poetry category was still up 7.2% this year and on course for its best year (The Guardian). NielsenIQ's Philip Stone said the sector was already on an upwards trajectory before Nolan's film, helped by the popularity of "Instapoets" — poets, such as Rupi Kaur, who built their audience through social media (The Guardian).

The 2026 bestselling poetry title by value is not an ancient text at all. I Still Believe in Miracles, the debut collection by London-based actor and poet Lucas Jones, generated £400,000, according to The Bookseller (The Guardian). The Canadian poet Rupi Kaur set the current benchmark for a single poet's UK annual sales in 2017, when her books generated £1.2 million through NielsenIQ BookScan's Total Consumer Market — a measure covering roughly 90% of UK consumer print sales (The Guardian).

Homer's two epics together account for £980,000 of UK poetry sales so far in 2026, equivalent to £1.20 of every £10 spent on poetry books in Britain (The Guardian). In the US, Publishers Weekly ranked The Odyssey at number two on its bestseller list for the week of 3 August 2026 (Publishers Weekly).

What stands out is the way a single film has pulled a 2,800-year-old poem to the top of the bestseller charts — while the poetry shelf around it was already climbing on its own.