Poetry Club: Nick Makoha & Roger Robinson

HOSTED BY Ekow Eshun

Poetry Club returns for 2025 with a special evening of readings and discussion to celebrate the launch of Nick Makoha‘s The New Carthaginians. There will be a panel discussion featuring Makoha and multi-award winning poet Roger Robinson, chaired by curator, writer and broadcaster Ekow Eshun. Makoha will then read from this expansive new collection, followed by a reading from Robinson with selections from 2019’s T.S. Eliot Prize winning volume Portable Paradise. Join us afterwards to celebrate the launch of The New Carthaginians in our atmospheric candlelit bar.

Nick Makoha

Nick Makoha is a Ugandan poet and playwright based in London. His debut collection, Kingdom of Gravity, was shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize and was one of the Guardian’s Best Books of the Year. His poems have appeared in The New York Times, the Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, Wasafiri, Boston Review, and Callaloo. He is the founder of Obsidian Foundation, winner of the 2021 Ivan Juritz Prize and the Poetry London Prize.

In his latest collection, The New Carthaginians, time – and with it the world – is out of joint. A hijacked plane lands at Entebbe International Airport in 1976, triggering the crisis that will lead to Idi Amin’s Uganda becoming a pariah state and, within a few years, to the young Nick Makoha’s flight from the country. A mysterious writer daubs poetic slogans on the walls of late-’70s New York City, signing them SAMO©. Three characters who are also one – the Poet, a Black Icarus and a resurrected Jean-Michel Basquiat – journey through a time that is both our own and not, watching TV, discussing art and literature and tucking their wings into their jackets on the way to airport security.

Concerned throughout with flight and falling, The New Carthaginians is a poetry collection of staggering originality: a work by an author at the height of his powers, in which the familiar Western canons of art, history and philosophy are prised apart and reassembled in a new configuration. Drawing on Basquiat’s technique of the ‘exploded’ collage, our heroes’ odyssey gathers the symbols of a new mythos, through which the othering of Black life might be undone and the stage set for some fresh emergence, some transfigured understanding of myth and life. “Hold that note,” writes the poet. “In this place you are no longer the chorus … In any future, remember you are a New Carthaginian.”

Roger Robinson

Roger Robinson is a writer and educator who has taught and performed worldwide and is an experienced workshop leader and lecturer on poetry. He was chosen by Decibel as one of 50 writers who have influenced the black-British writing canon. He received commissions from The National Trust, London Open House, BBC, The National Portrait Gallery, V&A, INIVA, MK Gallery and Theatre Royal Stratford East where he also was an associate artist. He is an alumnus of The Complete Works.

Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize 2019, the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2020 and a Royal Society of Literature Fellow, his latest collection A Portable Paradise was a New Statesman Book of the Year.

He co-founded Spoke Lab and the international writing collective Malika’s Poetry Kitchen. He is lead vocalist and lyricist for King Midas Sound and has also recorded solo albums with Jahtari Records.

“A Portable Paradise by Roger Robinson, removed the families caught up in the Grenfell fire from the mainstream media narrative of victimhood, and turn them into something altogether more magical and compassionate: real people living real lives. That such a thing seems radical in 2020 is an indictment of just how low the establishment narrative has stooped…” – James Patterson for i-D

EKOW ESHUN

A curator, writer and broadcaster. Described as a “cultural polymath” by The Guardian, he has been at the heart of international creative culture for several decades, curating exhibitions, authoring books, presenting documentaries and chairing high-profile lectures. His work stretches the span of identity, style, masculinity, art and culture.

He was the first Black editor of a major magazine in the UK (Arena Magazine in 1997) and continued to break ground as the first Black director of a major arts organisation, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London (2005-2010). As Chairman of the commissioning group for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, he leads one of the world’s most famous public art projects.

In July 2022, he curated In the Black Fantastic at the Hayward Gallery in London a landmark exhibition of visionary Black artists exploring myth, science fiction and Afrofuturism.

His most recent exhibition, The Time Is Always Now, is a landmark study of the Black figure and its representation in contemporary art. The show opened at the National Portrait Gallery, London and is travelling to multiple venues in the USA, including The Philadelphia Museum of Art. Eshun’s writing has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Financial Times, The Guardian, The Observer, Esquire and Wired.

His latest book is a work of creative nonfiction called The Strangers, published by Penguin which conjures the voices of five very different men. Ira Aldridge: nineteenth century actor and playwright. Matthew Henson: polar explorer. Frantz Fanon: psychiatrist and political philosopher. Malcolm X: activist leader. Justin Fashanu: million-pound footballer. He tells their stories with breathtaking lyricism and empathy, capturing both the hostility and the beauty they experienced in the world. And he locates them within a wider landscape of Black art, culture, history and politics which stretches from Africa to Europe to North America and the Caribbean.

“Thrilling and ingenious, propulsive and genre-defying: The Strangers is an outstanding book” – Bernardine Evaristo