Biography

Writing

Patience Agbabi (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia Commons

Patience Agbabi came to prominence in the spoken word scene in the late 1990s. This followed her acclaimed debut collection R.A.W., her collaboration with Adeola Agbebiyi and Dorothea Smart on FO(U)R WOMEN, and the success of Atomic Lip, touted as poetry’s first pop group. Mixing rap with a poetic style influenced by writers and performers as diverse as Sylvia Plath, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Public Enemy, Agbabi’s work is inflected by what she terms a ‘bicultural’ upbringing and outlook.

In the introduction to Agbabi’s debut collection R.A.W., Merle Collins describes her work as ‘poetry in the tradition of social commentary, informed by techniques of the oral performance mode,’ (9) reminding the reader that performance is Agbabi’s primary communication method. Yet she is equally adept at writing poems meant specifically to be read rather than heard. The poem ‘One Hell of a Storm’, for example, relies on visual structure to convey its meaning, evoking the rush of turbulent weather within a narrative of feminist resistance. Her 2000 collection Transformatrix brought Agbabi particular renown and she undertook writing residencies at institutions as diverse as Eton College, Oxford Brookes University, and ‘Flamin’ Eight’ tattoo parlour.

Her third collection, Bloodshot Monochrome (2008), deals most explicitly with themes of sexuality and race: poems such as ‘Comedown,’ ‘Skins’ and ‘Eat Me’ evoke the transnational anxieties of marginalisation and uncertain belonging in one’s own body and in social space. Literary critic Manuela Coppola notes that ‘as she steps beyond safe boundaries of literary conventions in a creative interplay of formal constraint and experimentation, Agbabi queers the sonnet form, destabilizing normative gay, lesbian, black, men’s and women’s identities’ (369). The comment gestures to the multiple influences on Agbabi’s work and her adept reshaping of traditional poetic forms so as to produce new conceptions of intersections between race, gender, and sexuality—conceptions that are loaded with social and political critique.

During her time as the Canterbury Poet Laureate, Agbabi produced her fourth collection, Telling Tales (2015), in which she satirically revises Chaucer’s fourteenth-century Canterbury Tales for modern times. Simon Armitage lauded Telling Tales as ‘the liveliest versions of Chaucer you’re likely to read.’ This collection was also shortlisted for the 2014 Ted Hughes for New Work in Poetry. In 2015, responding to the growing refugee crisis, Agbabi participated in the first Refugee Tales walks with Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group and Kent Refugee Help. The resulting collection of work from this project, published in 2016, reflects the capacity of the written word to capture otherwise inarticulable experiences of dislocation. Resistance to the dehumanising of refugees in the media and political narrative is encapsulated in the final line of Agbabi’s contribution to the collection: ‘The story ends where you put the frame: / but however it begins, remember my name’ (132).

—Chelsea Haith, 2019

Cite this: Haith, Chelsea. “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2019, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 14 April 2026.

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Biography

Writing

Moniza Alvi, 2016, Poets & Players (CC BY 3.0)

‘If I think about my work as a whole’, Moniza Alvi has said, ‘I can see that there is a theme of a split, a split I try to mend, it could be between England and Pakistan, body and soul, or husband and wife’. The same word, ‘split’, reappears in the title of her major retrospective, Split World. It is a clearly a world that interested her.

A split can be a painful fracture, a stratification or division, or a productive or enabling duality, and all of these meanings are explored in Alvi’s verse. Split is also a verb, and many of Alvi’s poems dramatize the process of a mind cleaving from its immediate surroundings: a British schoolchild fantasising about a different life in Pakistan, or a woman imagining the life of her daughter upstairs.

Fantasy is central to Alvi’s work. ‘People misunderstood’ her first collection, she has claimed: they ‘thought I was writing about my memories of Pakistan. I was writing about my fantasies. I hadn’t been there’. Poems from The Country at My Shoulder – such as those in the ‘Presents from Pakistan’ sequence – extrapolate surreal fantasies about Pakistan based on the few glimpses of Pakistani life which have pierced the speaker’s suburban British world.

Travelling to the Indian subcontinent for her second book A Bowl of Warm Air enlarged Alvi’s canvas. Poems like ‘An Unknown Girl’ explore the split between British-Asian and (in this case) Indian experience: the Indian fetish for ‘Western perms’ intersecting with the British-Asian desire for an ancestral destination in which to escape from those same ‘Western’ fashions.

Some of Alvi’s finest poems from her later career, such as ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik’ from Souls (2002) explore parenthood, the split between parents and children, whilst her book-length poem At the Time of Partition revisits the tragic impacts of the historical ‘splitting’ of India from Pakistan in 1947.

—William Ghosh, 2017

Cite this: Ghosh, William. “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2017, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 14 April 2026.

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Biography

Writing

Raymond Antrobus, 2017 (Photo: Robert Sharp / English PEN, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 via Flickr)

A dynamic contemporary poet, Antrobus is fast becoming one of the most acclaimed of his generation. His effervescent work testifies to the power and sophistication of British verse today. Merging the worlds of spoken and written poetry, his poems deploy arresting sonic effects to offer often hard-hitting social commentary. As a poet who is deaf, Antrobus also often integrates sign language into his performances and grapples with questions of communication in lively and captivating ways. He has an unmistakable mode of address and whether they are heard on stage or read aloud, Antrobus’s poems are impossible to forget.

His compositions have a direct, conversational quality, a feature that owes much to the importance of spoken word to the formation of his career and to his status a poet who foregrounds the power of hearing and being heard.

One of his earliest publications was Shapes & Disfigurements of Raymond Antrobus (2012), which was succeeded in 2017 by another pamphlet, entitled To Sweeten Bitter. The latter unpacks the bonds between himself and his late father, who had passed away three years before. In 2018, his first book, The Perseverance, was released to wide acclaim. Named after a pub of the same name in his hometown of Hackney, Antrobus’s debut is grounded in his life growing up in London. Among its many themes, the collection explores his experiences as a deaf poet interested in the spoken word. As a child, he was bullied at school for his deafness and was briefly misidentified as dyslexic.

Now, as an adult, his writing features on school syllabuses and he maintains his passion for teaching by linking his poetry with education. For Antrobus, this is one of the most important facets of his career as, in his words: ‘I felt that I got more education outside the classroom. That was part of why I started working in schools’ and bringing modern poetry to students. He also notes the worrying statistic that 75% of young deaf people in the UK, and 95% of deaf Jamaicans, are raised illiterate due to failings and ignorance in their education systems. This concern is one he passionately aims to flag up and help resolve through both his poetry and his teaching.

—Daniele Nunziata, 2020

Cite this: Nunziata, Daniele. “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2020, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 14 April 2026.

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Biography

Writing

Vahni Capildeo, 2008, Georgia Popplewell (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Concentrating on notions of home and belonging in her most recent collection Measures of Expatriation (2016), Capildeo’s work gestures broadly to contemporary concerns about migration, expatriation and displacement, but is also deeply interested in exploring the details of everyday life. She engages with subjects ranging from mental illness and a Londoner’s commute, to the meaning of shoes and broken relationships with the self and with others. Malika Booker described Measures of Expatriation as ‘poetry that transforms’, emphasising the way that the collection captures the experience of living in the liminal spaces of cultures, languages and traditions.

Capildeo also works between styles; experimenting in prose-poetry and dramatic monologues as well as in traditional verse and performance. Language has been a central concern in both her careful writing process and the content of her collections: her third and fourth publications, Dark and Unaccustomed Words (2012) and Utter (2013), were inspired by her time working as a lexicographer at the Oxford English Dictionary. ‘Language’s musicality structures my texts,’ she said in an interview, and her preoccupation with this musicality can be heard in the stylistic choices she makes in recordings of her poetry. Critics have praised Capildeo for the craftsmanship of her work. Brian Catling described her debut collection No Traveller Returns (2003) as ‘crafted silver turning on faultless glass’ and this quality has since developed into a poetic and cross-genre flair in her more recent work incorporating performance, art and sound.

—Chelsea Haith, 2017

Cite this: Haith, Chelsea. “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2017, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 14 April 2026.

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Biography

Writing

Kayo Chingonyi, 2008, Ant Smith (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Warsan Shire has described Chingonyi’s debut collection Kumukanda (Chatto & Windus, 2017) as a “brilliant debut – a tender, nostalgic and at times darkly hilarious exploration of black boyhood, masculinity and grief”. Much of Chingonyi’s work plays on these themes; weaving loss, masculinity, black identity and maturity into music, traditional poetic styles and spoken word. Chingonyi’s styles and modes of dissemination mirror a thematic concern that weaves through most of his publications, that of being ‘between worlds’. Referencing a cricket test match and rap music videos, Chingonyi highlights racial politics in high school sport and classrooms in ‘calling a spade a spade’ – writing:

Raised as I was, some words in this argot catch
in the throat, seemingly made for someone else
(the sticking point from which all else is fixed).

Here the in-between space is a catch in the throat, elsewhere, a border, or a heritage lost in diaspora.

His first pamphlet was received, in Natalie Teitler’s words, as a ‘beautifully structured, almost traditional work which fits well into the traditional British Canon. Closer reading, however, reveals a complex and sometimes subversive approach’. His more recent work is concerned with resistance – ‘the resistance to being defined’, as Kate Kellaway puts it. Placing his work both within and outside of the canon, these critics highlight the spaces that Chingonyi’s poetry brings into concert and the rising interest by British poets in navigating the borders between literary and performance genres. As an emcee and DJ his work reflects the influences of jazz, hip hop and RnB and his style infuses melancholic music with the clever rhythm and internal rhyme for which his poetry is known.

—Chelsea Haith, 2017

Cite this: Haith, Chelsea. “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2017, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 14 April 2026.

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Biography

Writing

Kwame Dawes, Poetas de los cinco continentes, Di / Verso 2017, by Mariano Castillo / Secretaría de Cultura CDMX (CC-BY-SA 2.0) via Flickr

All Kwame Dawes’s work is pervaded by a conviction that writing, and in particular poetry, matters intensely to how we understand the world and relate to one another. This is also evident in the several plays he has written, acted in, directed and produced, most recently One Love at the Lyric Hammersmith in London. In 2007 he released A Far Cry from Plymouth Rock: A Personal Narrative. His essays have appeared in numerous journals and periodicals including the London Review of Books, Granta, The Washington Post, and USA Today. Among his many awards and prizes are a Pushcart Prize, a Musgrave Medal, the 2019 Windham-Campbell prize, and an Emmy for HOPE: Living and Loving with AIDS in Jamaica. In 2018 he was named a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, an honorary position held in the past by W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, and Mark Strand.

Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds aims to recognise the ways in which Black and Asian British writers confront particular challenges in their writing careers, not least the tendency for institutions, including the publishing industry, to overlook and mishear their voices. Founded in 2012 by Dawes, the African Poetry Book Fund (APBF) seeks to address this problem directly by publishing and promoting the work of African poets, including those of the diaspora. Writers Make Worlds is especially delighted to feature the APBF, and this panel discussing their work, convened by Dawes. In the UK, poets published by the APBF include: Warsan Shire, Janet Kofi-Tsekpo, Mary-Alice Daniel, Nick Makoha, and Victoria Adukwei Bulley.

—Katherine Collins, 2019

Cite this: Collins, Katherine. “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2019, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 14 April 2026.

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Biography

Writing

Inua Ellams, 2009. Photo: Kim-Leng (CC BY-ND 2.0)

Ellams’s lyricism and cultural references point to influences ranging from Shakespeare’s Hamlet to the intellectual playfulness of Terry Pratchett, with a strong undertow running throughout of Nigerian oral literature or orature. Critic and writer Delia Jarrett-Macauley highlights the success of Ellams’s ‘linguistic, but low-key virtuosity’, as strikingly demonstrated in the lines written for his stage characters. Inspired by his heroes, the Nigerian writers Chinua Achebe and Ben Okri, Ellams’s poems and plays tell stories of his own life and those of others’ that are infused with the myths, legends, market gossip and lively cultural intermingling of his birth country.

Writing about Ellams’s dramatic work, Nigerian critic Uche-Chinemere Nwaozuzu notes that the solo drama style of his play The 14^th Tale reflects characteristic dramatizations in Nigeria of the outsider figure who struggles to come to terms with their identity and with fate. For Nwaozuzu, the play’s protagonist is a ‘split personality who battles with inherited personal demons and the need to chart a social identity’ during his youth in Nigeria and later in the diaspora. At the same time, he embodies the classical image of the Greek hero at the mercy of fate. Another of Ellams’s influences, Wole Soyinka, writes about characters beset by internal conflict in comparable ways, such as in a play like The Road. Here we see Ellams bringing together and channelling influences from European and Nigerian dramatic traditions into the British dramatic scene.

Ellams’s first full poetry collection The Actual / Fuck began its life as an anti-Trump project tentatively called ‘Fuck 45’ that Ellams composed on buses, trains and in the in-between moments of his busy life (Armitstead, The Guardian, 2019). His target was clearly the populist right-wing nationalism of the 45^th president of the United States, and the way in which Donald Trump’s values revealed that country’s divided consciousness. Drawing also upon his own experiences of troubled national myth-making, Ellams’s collection comprises fifty-five poems that engage passionately with themes of empire, nationalism, and racism, while also calling out the corroding, toxic effects of some forms of masculinity.

Speaking about his writing process at the Oxford Playhouse Search Party online event in November 2020, Ellams observed that many of his ideas first start as poems and then move into dramatic and dialogue forms that are further fleshed out on stage. He feels therefore that he is first and foremost a poet. However, all of his work grows out of his two major thematic and experiential influences: his odyssey as a migrant to Britain, and his experience of finding ways to belong in his new country. His journey from Jos, Nigeria to London via Dublin at the age of twelve is an especially major influence on his stage work and is frequently alluded to if not directly referenced in his plays, especially in his early work. His poems deal prominently with questions of being-in-place, and of cultural differences experienced in the African diaspora.

Ellams’s work is produced  in the moment and he shares it generously, drawing on the world as he sees it and performing off the cuff at the audience’s whim. In performance, he is innovative and daring. For example, he often uses an app to search for and share poems using single words suggested by the audience. His virtuoso mix of deep cross-cultural allusion with technological innovation is reflected in his recognition as one of the Royal Society of Literature’s 40 under 40 writers.

—Chelsea Haith, 2021

Cite this: Haith, Chelsea. “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2021, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 14 April 2026.

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Biography

Writing

Evaristo’s work spans times, places, and literary genres, often exploring what she has called ‘the hidden narratives of the African diaspora’ and ‘cross[ing] the borders of genre, race, culture, history, and […] sexuality’. From The Emperor’s Babe (2001), set in multicultural Roman London in the 3^rd century CE, to the semi-autobiographical Lara, which traces its path across seven generations and three continents, Evaristo’s work reimagines neglected histories in vibrant, evocative ways. Challenging the reader to contemplate the past and its legacy in the present, Blonde Roots (2008) inverts the racial dynamics of the transatlantic slave trade, depicting a world in which Europeans are enslaved by Africans, while her most recent novel, Mr Loverman (2013), examines sexuality and societal pressures through the experience of her Antiguan-born, London-living protagonist.

Bernardine Evaristo (Photo: Hayley Madden)

Adeptly combining verse and prose, Evaristo’s writing defies easy categorisation in a way that simultaneously reflects the refusal of her characters to be pigeon-holed into one, singular identity. She has made the form of the ‘verse novel’ her own, utilising her earlier experience of theatre and performance to infuse her work with a rhythm, tone, and voice that allows her writing to straddle the boundaries between the written and the spoken word. As author Ali Smith has observed, ‘Bernardine Evaristo can take any story from any time and turn it into something vibrating with life’.

—Justine McConnell, 2017

Cite this: McConnell, Justine. “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2017, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 14 April 2026.

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Biography

Writing

Caleb Femi (photo: Caleb Femi)

When Caleb Femi became the Young People’s Laureate for London in 2016, he explained his vision for the role as seeking to,

re-engage young people, who have long been disenfranchised, through poetry. I don’t see it as far-fetched to normalise poetry among all demographics of young people in London. Poetry is the one of the purest forms of conversation there is. At its best, it allows us to communicate from an honest and safe place. And young people deserve to be included in such spaces.

Femi’s commitment to ridding poetry of its inaccessibility, revealing it instead as an art form in which young people’s voices can be heard, is central to the task of the Young People’s Laureate. Originally the role was known as London’s Young Poet Laureate (a post first held by Warsan Shire), so the name-change signals the emphasis on engaging young people across the city. In keeping with this, Femi has brought the democratising power of the internet to bear on his work throughout his career. He has uploaded his spoken word performances and short films, and made them freely available via his website and YouTube.

In this way Femi puts into practice his belief that poetry always remains unfinished, ready to be reworked and reshaped at any time. It is an idea he first explored in his undergraduate dissertation when he focused on the work of American poet Emily Dickinson, who frequently rewrote her poems or left them deliberately unfinished. In his own poetry it can be seen, for example, in the different versions of ‘Coconut Oil’ to be found online. One of these poignantly changes the close of the poem.

Often autobiographical, Femi’s poetry frequently focuses on the experiences of being a young black man in Britain. He has become a sought-after speaker, addressing audiences at the Tate Modern, the South Bank Centre, and TEDx events. In 2018, his poem ‘A Tale of Modern Britain’ was commissioned by Heathrow airport, to celebrate – in Femi’s words – ‘what it means to be British and the emotions that unite us all when we travel’. Images of the poet performing his poetry and giving words to people’s experience of flight are visible on big screens around the airport in exciting and provocative ways.

—Justine McConnell, 2018

Cite this: McConnell, Justine. “Caleb Femi.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2018, https://writersmakeworlds.com/caleb-femi/. Accessed 14 April 2026.

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Biography

Writing

Sarah Howe (photo: Hayley Madden)

The work of the British-Hong Kong poet Sarah Howe negotiates between Britain and elsewhere, revealing the strangeness of home, and the familiarity of foreign places, especially for those who are migrants and refugees. Howe frequently experiments with language in her poetry to explore the complexities of her dual heritage. When awarding Howe the honour of Young Poet of the Year in 2015, Sunday Times editor Andrew Holgate praised her for being a “writer always conscious of language.” The poems in her debut collection, Loop of Jade, hold a wide scope both linguistically and thematically. Poems such as “Drawn with a very fine camelhair brush” and “Having just broken the water pitcher” examine Chinese characters, words that Howe incorporated into her poetry as she learned them in real life. Other poems reference a vast array of poets in the western literary canon that Howe has read and studied, from Philip Sidney to Ezra Pound and John Ashbery. In particular, Howe has cited American poetry, which she discovered as an exchange student at Harvard, as a major influence in her writing. Overall, she claims that all of the poems in Loop of Jade are “related by the fact that, at different times and ways, they shaped [her] personhood.”

A recurring theme in Howe’s poetry is her limited memory of and deep desire to reconnect with her Chinese heritage. Three narrative poems in Loop of Jade – “Crossing from Guangdong”, “Loop of Jade” and “Islands” – focus on reimagining her mother’s childhood as an orphaned girl in Hong Kong. Howe has claimed that poetry, as a form of life-writing, allows her the freedom to explore unverified family tales without the expectation of accuracy. The visual spaces in her poems reflect pauses and silences in her mother’s storytelling. To fill in the gaps of her family history, Howe often borrows from her knowledge of literature and mythology in various cultures. An example is “Tame”, a myth-like narrative that focuses on the daughter of a Chinese family, but which draws from the Roman myth of Apollo and Daphne. The mix of allusions allows Howe to interpret her mother’s experience of gender discrimination, but also clues in the reader that the text is an imagined representation from the perspective of a westernised poet.

Howe’s poetry also provides commentary on contemporary politics in China and Hong Kong. In Loop of Jade, the poem “Innumerable” attempts to reconcile Howe’s memory of the Tiananmen Massacre as a child and her knowledge of the tragedy as an adult. As a Fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Centre, Howe wrote a sequence of erasure poetry titled “Two Systems”. By removing words from the Hong Kong Basic Law, she reshaped the document into a “self-destructing text” to emphasize Hong Kong’s diminishing autonomy under China’s tightening hold.

—Lorraine Lau, 2018

Cite this: Lau, Lorraine. “Sarah Howe.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2018, https://writersmakeworlds.com/sarah-howe/. Accessed 14 April 2026.

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