Joelle Taylor is a poet, playwright & author. She became the UK Slam champion in 2000 and founded  SLAMbassadors, the UK national youth Slam championship, where she served as artistic director & coach 2001 to 2018. Published works include Songs…

Malika Booker is the author of ‘Breadfruit’ (Flipped Eye Publishing, 2007) and ‘Pepper Seed’ (Peepal Tree Press, 2013), which was longlisted for the 2014 OCM Bocas Prize and shortlisted for the 2014 Seamus Heaney Centre Prize. More recently, she has won the 2019 Cholmondeley Award and the 2020 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. 

Will Burns is a poet and novelist. He first came to prominence in 2014 as a Faber New Poet and has since authored poetry collections ‘Country Music’ (Offord Road Books, 2020) which won the 2021 Laurel Prize for best first collection, & ‘Germ Songs’ (Rough Trade Books, 2019). He released the album Chalk Hill Blue in 2019, a collaboration with composer Hannah Peel whose music was set to his poems. (Hannah Peel, 2019.) His debut novel, The Paper Lantern (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2021) saw Burns named among The Observer’s Top 10 Debut Novelists of 2021. He is Poet-In-Residence at Caught By The River.

Momtaza Mehri is a Somali-British poet and essayist. She grew up in the Middle East, and is currently based in London. She began writing poetry for publication in 2014. Her work has appeared in the likes of Granta, Artforum, The Guardian, BOMB Magazine, and The Poetry Review. She is the former Young People’s Laureate for London and columnist-in-residence at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Open Space, as well as a Frontier-Antioch Fellow at Antioch University. In 2018 she was the co-winner of the Brunel International African Poetry prize, and in 2019 she won the Manchester Writing Prize. Her latest pamphlet, Doing the Most with the Least, was published by Goldsmiths Press.

Nii Ayikwei Parkes grew up in Ghana but was born in the UK where he later returned for further study, where with the friendship and tutelage of fellow black poets he became a vibrant new voice in British performance poetry. 

Rachel Long is the founder of Octavia Poetry Collective for Womxn of Colour, a ‘fiercely community-minded’ collective formed in direct response to the lack of inclusivity and representation in literature and the academy.

Victoria Adukwei Bulley is a British-born Ghanaian poet, writer, and filmmaker who was shortlisted for the Brunel University African Poetry Prize in 2016 and received an Eric Gregory Award for her pamphlet Girl B, published as part of the New Generation African Poets series in 2017.

Antrobus has many accolades to his name, including the Ted Hughes Award, Sunday Times / University of Warwick Young Writer of The Year Award, and Guardian Poetry Book of the Year 2018.

Yomi Sode is a greatly celebrated and vitally needed voice in the UK’s poetry scene. Born in Oyo State Nigeria, his entry into the world of storytelling came in the form of musicality, a quality easily witnessed in his approach to brilliantly paced and finely woven stories.

Nick Makoha is the author of ‘The Lost Collection of an Invisible Man’ (Flipped Eye Publishing, 2005), ‘The Second Republic’ (Slapering Hol Press, 2014), ‘The Kingdom of Gravity’ (Peepal Tree Press, 2017) and ‘Resurrection Man’ (Jai-Alai Books, 2018) 

Derek Walcott (1930-2017) was awarded the Nobel prize for Literature in 1992, two years after the publication of his most ambitious and celebrated work, Omeros, an epic poem which draws on the Homeric tradition and relocates it in the voices…

Roger Robinson is a fervent, generous poet. His most recent collection, A Portable Paradise, won both the 2019 T. S. Eliot Prize and the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize 2020 for a distinguished work evoking the spirit of a place – in this instance, post-Windrush Britain.

Jay Bernard is a writer, film programmer and archivist from London. As well as working on BFI Flare, London’s LGBTQ film festival, they work at Statewatch, a state research library, archive and collection based at Mayday Rooms. Jay’s first collection…

Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco in 1942. She studied at Stanford University and received her PhD from Columbia University, where she wrote a thesis on Ralph Waldo Emerson. She has published twelve books of poems, including Satan Says (1980), The Father (1992), Stag’s Leap (2012), Odes (2016)…

Born in south-east London where they still live, Kae Tempest made their live debut as a spoken-word artist at sixteen. Having initially conceived of themselves as a rapper, Tempest found their work was also extremely popular at poetry slams; they…

Writing in his 1990s study of Alasdair Gray’s novels, Stephen Bernstein identifies Gray as “one of the most important living writers in English. His satirical blend of realism and fantasy and his compassionate use of humor and sorrow distinguish his…

Edgar Allan Poe was born in 1809, the son of poverty-stricken actors. His father died from consumption; soon afterwards, his English mother, who in her time had played Juliet, Ophelia and a range of Shakespearian leading roles, died and left…

Sarah Howe was born in Hong Kong in 1983 to an English father and Chinese mother, and moved to England as a child. She studied English at Cambridge, where from 2010-2015 she was a Research Fellow at Gonville and Caius…