Poetry Club: Jason Allen-Paisant, Malika Booker & Zaffar Kunial

(This is a past event and is no longer running)

POETRY

We are delighted to welcome Jason Allen-Paisant, Malika Booker and Zaffar Kunial, three of the finest poets of their generation for a spell-binding evening of poetry – the second in the 2023 series which marks the 10th anniversary of our poetry series. Books will be available for purchase and signature in the bar afterwards where all are welcome to stay for a drink and chat to the poets.

Jason Allen-Paisant will be reading from his new collection Self-Portrait as Othello. This will be its London launch  – reimagining of Shakespeare’s Othello for the modern age, intertwining the identities of ‘immigrant’ and ‘Black’. Self-Portrait as Othello is already attracting critical acclaim and is a Poetry Book Society Spring Choice. He is a poet and academic from a village called Coffee Grove in Manchester, Jamaica. He now lives in Leeds, where he teaches at the University.

‘Jason Allen-Paisant deftly inscribes his own signature on worlds inner and outer in these gorgeous poems. The future of Caribbean lyric poetry is in great hands’ Lorna Goodison

Malika Booker is a writer, poet, multidisciplinary artist, and creative writing lecturer. Her first collection of poetry, Pepper Seed (Peepal Tree Press, 2013) was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre prize. She has won the Forward Prize twice, in 2017 and 2020, for Best Single Poem. She was the inaugural Poet In Residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company and in 2019, received a Cholmondeley Award for her outstanding contribution to poetry.

‘a pioneer of the present spoken word movement in the UK.’ Lemn Sissay

Zaffar Kunial reads from his TS Eliot Prize 2023 shortlisted collection England’s Green, in which we are invited to look at the place and the language we think we know, and we are made to think again. In 2014, he published a pamphlet in the Faber New Poets series, was awarded The Poetry Society’s Geoffrey Dearmer Prize and was Poet-in-Residence at the Wordsworth Trust. His debut collection, Us (Faber, 2018), was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and other awards. Zaffar Kunial was born in Birmingham and lives in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire.

‘…there’s something about the precise, thoughtful, unhurried way in which he interrogates language that marks him out as a unique talent. As the Scottish poet Jackie Kay has said, he is a real find.’ The Scotsman

Poetry Club is supported by the TS Eliot Foundation.

This event is presented in association with Renaissance One.