Raymond Antrobus is a Hackney-born British Jamaican poet, educator, editor and curator of the Chill Pill event series. He published a pamphlet, To Sweeten Bitter in 2017, and his book, The Perseverance was published in 2018. He is a Complete Works III fellow and one of the world’s first recipients of an MA in Spoken Word education from Goldsmiths, University of London. He is also one of three current recipients of the Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship. His poem, Sound Machine, first published in The Poetry Review in Spring 2017, was the winner of the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize 2017, judged by Ocean Vuong.
“His monologues are stunning studies of voice and substance, and his lyric poems are graceful and finely crafted.” — Kwame Dawes.
“Raymond uses nostalgia for a place and a time, but resists sentimentality completely. He makes the reader/listener experience the moment with all the senses and very skilfully sets that up against a harsher reality.” — Imtiaz Dharker.
Salena Godden is one of the UK’s foremost poets, regularly anthologised and headlining festivals nationally and internationally. A BBC regular, Salena Godden has written and presented several arts and music programmes – a film of her poem Titanic was aired as part of BBC poetry programme We Belong Here. A short-fiction Blue Cornflowers was shortlisted for the Guardian Short Story Prize 2016.
Her essay Shade was published in 2016’s literary sensation The Good Immigrant, which won the Reader’s Choice Book Of The Year Award. A new piece Skin was commissioned for The Essay and broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in February 2017. Her live album LIVEwire showcases a broad range of her work and has attracted rave reviews since launching with indie poetry label Nymphs and Thugs.
Nikita Gill is a British-Indian writer and poet. With a huge online following, her words have entranced hearts and minds all over the world.
The first time Nikita Gill realised that she loved writing was when she was 12 and had just published her first piece in a local newspaper in India. It was an article about her grandfather as a young man in Kashmir. “It was an incredible feeling, to give a story to people you do not know, and to know that they may take something away from it,” she says.
Perhaps, it is this desire to connect beyond physical limitations that kept Nikita Gill hooked on writing and has made her an Instagram star; she has an army of 2.5 million followers. In 2015, she started uploading her poems on Instagram (nikita_gill), a medium that had just started to get people curious about it. Her books include Wild Embers, Fierce Fairytales and Great Goddesses.