POETRY LONDON - Key Persons
Aminata is a Goldsmiths graduate from Turin, Italy. She recently completed her English and Drama BA and her main field of study is the relationship between fiction and fan cultures. She is an author for the Italian magazine Scomodo, and she published her short stories on various magazines.
André Naffis-Sahely is the author of the collection The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life (Penguin, 2017) and the pamphlet The Other Side of Nowhere (Rough Trade Books, 2019). He is also the editor of The Heart of a Stranger: An Anthology of Exile Literature (Pushkin Press, 2020). His work as a literary translator includes titles by Balzac, Zola, Frankétienne, Abdellatif La bi and Tahar Ben Jelloun. He has taught at Whittier College, Occidental College and UCLA, where he was the Author in Residence, and he is a Visiting Teaching Fellow at the Manchester Writing School. He is from Abu Dhabi, but was born in Venice to an Iranian father and an Italian mother.
Job Titles:
- Editor
- Member of the Editorial Board
Camille Ralphs (b. 1992, Stoke-on-Trent) is a poet, critic and editor. Her poems and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in magazines including the New York Review of Books, the Poetry Review, The Spectator and the London Magazine, and she has released three pamphlets: Malkin (The Emma Press, 2015), which was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award; uplifts & chains (If A Leaf Falls/Glyph Press, 2020); and Daydream College for Bards (Guillemot Press, forthcoming 2023). She writes critically for publications including The Telegraph, The Poetry Review and the Los Angeles Review of Books, produces a regular column for Poetry London and conducts an interview series for Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal. She is Poetry Editor at the Times Literary Supplement. Her debut collection of poems, After You Were, I Am, will be published by Faber in 2024.
Job Titles:
- Editor
- Member of the Editorial Board
Declan Ryan's first collection, Crisis Actor, was published by Faber & Faber in 2023. His reviews and essays have appeared in journals including New York Review of Books, The Baffler, Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, The Observer, Poetry, Los Angeles Review of Books and New Statesman.
Don Paterson was born in Dundee in 1963. His poetry has won many awards, including the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Costa Poetry Award, all three Forward Prizes and, on two occasions, the T S Eliot Prize. He was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2009. Until recently he was Professor of Poetry at the University of St Andrews (he is now Professor Emeritus), and was Poetry Editor at Picador Macmillan for twenty-five years. He also works as a jazz musician. Shortly after the launch of his memoir, Toy Fights: A Boyhood (Faber, 2023), he sat down with our Reviews Editor Isabelle Baafi to talk about the influence of music and play on his childhood and poetry.
Ellen McAteer is General Manager of Poetry London, founder of Tell It Slant poetry bookshop in Glasgow, and on the Editorial Board of Gutter magazine. Her poetry pamphlet Honesty Mirror, published by Red Squirrel, won First Prize in the New Writer magazine pamphlet competition judged by Helen Mort. She won the 2017 Waterstones' Refugee Week Poetry Competition, and has been shortlisted for the Baker Prize. She has been a visiting lecturer at the Glasgow School of Art and on the University of Oxford Creative Writing MSt, a mentee of the Clydebuilt Verse Apprenticeship Scheme, under Alexander Hutchison, and a singer with the band Stone Tape. She is one of the 2023 cohort of the London Library Emerging Writers Programme.
Our New Poets Mentoring Scheme (currently funded by the Fenton Arts Trust) enables poets from a wide range of backgrounds, and of limited means, to work with a prominent mid-career mentor through constructive critique of their poems, advice on routes to publication, and confidence-building support.
Job Titles:
- Editor
- Member of the Editorial Board
Fred D'Aguiar's books include poetry, fiction, plays and a memoir. His most recent publications are a memoir, Year of Plagues (Carcanet, 2021) and a collection of poetry, titled For the Unnamed (Carcanet, 2023). His previous collection, Letters to America (Carcanet 2020) was a PBS Winter Choice. And a pamphlet, Arboretum for the Hunted (Arc, 2023).
Born in London of Guyanese parents, he grew up in Guyana and returned to the UK for his secondary and tertiary education. Currently, he is Professor of English at UCLA.
Job Titles:
- Director
- Chairman of the Board of Trustees
Ian is currently a director of an international financial software company with responsibilities across strategy, program management and organizational development. Outside his professional life he was previously the chair of the Board of Trustees at the Poetry School.
Isabelle Baafi is British poet and editor of Jamaican and South African descent. Her debut pamphlet, Ripe (ignitionpress), won a Somerset Maugham Award and was a PBS Pamphlet Choice. Her writing has been published in The Poetry Review, Magma, and elsewhere. She is a Ledbury Poetry Critic, an Obsidian Foundation Fellow, and an Editor at Magma. She is currently studying Creative Writing at the University of Oxford and writing her debut collection
Jack is a barrister practicing from Henderson Chambers in Temple, London. Before joining the Bar he took a master's degree in Modernist literature, writing his thesis on Ezra Pound's publication history in post-war Italy, then worked as an editor at an auction house and at a gallery specialising in Modern British art. He has written on art for a number of national publications.
Lisa Kiew is an accountant, charity sector leader and poet. She has led finance and broader organisational functions for a diverse range of not-for-profit organisations for close to 20 years. She is actively involved and a contributor to sector developments in strategic finance and governance through Charity Finance Group (CFG) and ICSA: The Governance Institute; and a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA).
Her debut pamphlet The Unquiet came out with Offord Road Books in 2019. She is one of the 2019/2020 London Library Emerging Writers. She was shortlisted for 2017 Primers mentoring and publication scheme. Her poems have been published in Brittle Star, Butcher's Dog, Ink Sweat and Tears, Lighthouse, Magma, Obsessed with Pipework, Tears in the Fence, The Scores, The North and Wasifiri, among other magazines and websites.
Job Titles:
- Editor
- Member of the Editorial Board
Described by the Independent as a ‘one-woman, agit-prop literary-political movement', Meena Kandasamy is a poet, writer, translator, anti-caste activist and academic based in Chennai, India. Her extensive corpus includes two poetry collections, Touch (2006) and Ms Militancy (2010), as well as three novels, The Gypsy Goddess (2014), When I Hit You (2017) and Exquisite Cadavers (2019). In 2022, she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL) and was also awarded the PEN Hermann Kesten Prize for her writing and work as a ‘fearless fighter for democracy, human rights and the free word.' Her latest published work is The Book of Desire, a translation of the love poetry of Thirukkural, and her own pamphlet of political poetry, Tomorrow Someone Will Arrest You.
Job Titles:
- Editor
- Member of the Editorial Board
Niall Campbell is a poet from the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. His first poetry collection, Moontide, was published by Bloodaxe Books and won the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award and the Saltire First Book of the Year. Noctuary, his second collection, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. He lives in Fife.
Phoebe lives in Manchester and currently works as a Senior Consutant for Achates cultural consultancy, as well as delivering freelance consultancy for arts and social justice organisations. She has previously worked for The Bush Theatre and The Poetry Society, and is a mentor for the charity Arts Emergency.
Phoebe received the Mairtín Crawford Poetry Award in 2019, and a Northern Writers' Award for poetry in 2012. Her poetry and criticism have appeared in Under the Radar, The Tangerine, The Moth, Ambit, Magma, The Observer, The TLS, and as part of the Northern Poetry Library's ‘Poem of the North' exhibition. Her debut poetry pamphlet, Animal Noises, was published by Green Bottle press in 2020.
Job Titles:
- Editor
- Member of the Editorial Board
Romalyn Ante FRSL is a Filipino-British poet, essayist, and editor. She was born and bred in Batangas, Philippines and migrated to her second home, Wolverhampton, at sixteen. She is co-founding editor of harana poetry, a magazine for poets who write in English as a second or parallel language, and the founder of Tsaá with Roma, an online interview series with poets and other creatives. Her debut collection is Antiemetic for Homesickness (Chatto & Windus). She was awarded the Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship and was recently elected as a Royal Society of Literature Fellow.
Job Titles:
- Chartered Accountant
- Treasurer
Shahrukh is a chartered accountant working for South Bank Employers Group, South Bank BID and Jubilee Gardens Trust. With ten years' experience of not-for-profit and charity sectors, he has a broad base of finance skills, knowledge and acumen to support Poetry London.
He has a strong interest in arts and culture and believes it has the power to enhance society. He enjoys writing poetry and plays in his spare time and catching live readings and shows. He also writes a blog which cover his many other passions including film, music and art. He has a keen interest in ensuring poetry continues to grow, be more accessible and empower as many people as possible.