Thomas Stearns Eliot was a poet, essayist and playwright. He was a leading figure in English-language Modernist poetry where he reinvigorated the art through the use of language, writing style, and verse structure. He is also noted for his critical essays, which often re-evaluated long-held cultural beliefs.
Aldwyn Roberts HBM DA, better known by the stage name Lord Kitchener, was a Trinidadian calypsonian. He has been described as "the grand master of calypso" and "the greatest calypsonian of the post-war age".
Donald Paterson is a Scottish poet, writer and musician. His work has won several awards, including the Forward Poetry Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. He was recipient of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry 2009.
The T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry is a prize for poetry awarded by the T. S. Eliot Foundation. For many years it was awarded by the Eliots' Poetry Book Society (UK) for "the best collection of new verse in English first published in the UK or the Republic of Ireland" in any particular year. The Prize was inaugurated in 1993 in celebration of the Poetry Book Society's 40th birthday and in honour of its founding poet, T. S. Eliot. Since its inception, the prize money was donated by Eliot's widow, Valerie Eliot and more recently it has been given by the T. S. Eliot Estate.
Kwame Senu Neville Dawes is a Ghanaian poet, actor, editor, critic, musician, and former Louis Frye Scudder Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of South Carolina. He is now Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and editor-in-chief at Prairie Schooner magazine.
Nii Ayikwei Parkes, born in the United Kingdom to parents from Ghana, where he was raised, is a performance poet, writer, publisher and sociocultural commentator. He is one of 39 writers aged under 40 from sub-Saharan Africa who in April 2014 were named as part of the Hay Festival's prestigious Africa39 project. He writes for children under the name K.P. Kojo.
Vahni Anthony Ezekiel Capildeo is a Trinidad and Tobago-born British writer, and a member of the extended Capildeo family that has produced notable Trinidadian politicians and writers.
David Dabydeen FRSL is a Guyanese-born broadcaster, novelist, poet and academic. He was formerly Guyana's Ambassador to UNESCO from 1997 to 2010, and was the youngest Member of the UNESCO Executive Board (1993–1997), elected by the General Council of all Member States of UNESCO. He was appointed Guyana's Ambassador Plenipotentiary and Extraordinaire to China, from 2010 to 2015. He is one of the longest serving diplomats in the history of Guyana, most of his work done in a voluntary unpaid capacity. He is a cousin of Guyana-born Canadian writer Cyril Dabydeen.
John Joseph Maria Figueroa was a Jamaican poet and educator. He played a significant role in the development of Anglophone Caribbean literature both as a poet and an anthologist. He contributed to the development of the University College of the West Indies as an early member of staff, and had a parallel career as a broadcaster, working for various media organizations including the BBC. He also taught in Jamaica, Britain, the United States, Nigeria and Puerto Rico.
Cyril Dabydeen is a Guyana-born Canadian writer of Indian descent. He grew up in Rose Hall sugar plantation with the sense of Indian indenture rooted in his family background. He is a cousin of the UK writer David Dabydeen.
Peepal Tree Press is a publisher based in Leeds, England which publishes Caribbean, Black British, and South Asian fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama and academic books. Poet Kwame Dawes has said, "Peepal Tree Press's position as the leading publisher of Caribbean literature, and especially of Caribbean poetry, is unassailable."
Anthony Joseph & The Spasm Band were a band led by Trinidadian poet, novelist and lecturer Anthony Joseph. The band was formed in London in 2005 as an offshoot of his then novel-in-progress The African Origins of UFOs. The band's musical influences include Free Jazz, Afro-Caribbean funk, spoken word, soca, rapso, Calypso, Rock and the hypnotic Spiritual Baptist rhythms that were prominent in Joseph's childhood in Trinidad. In December 2005, as a quartet, they recorded their first album 'The Spasm Band' in London. The album was self produced and received only limited exposure. It was heard via Myspace by Parisian producer and Jazz aficionado Antoine Rajon who signed Joseph to his Heavenly Sweetness label and released the Spasm Band's debut 12" EP Spirit Lash, which featured songs from their initial recordings.
Fiona Ruth Sampson is a British poet, writer, editor, translator and academic who was the first woman editor of Poetry Review since Muriel Spark. She received a MBE for services to literature in 2017.
Leone Ross FRSL is a British novelist, short story writer, editor, journalist and academic, who is of Jamaican and Scottish ancestry.
Roger Robinson is a British writer, musician and performer who lives between England and Trinidad. He is best known for A Portable Paradise, which won the T. S. Eliot Prize 2019.
Hannah Lowe is a British writer, known for her collection of poetry Chick (2013), her family memoir Long Time, No See (2015) and her research into the historicising of the HMT Empire Windrush and postwar Caribbean migration to Britain. Her 2021 book The Kids won the Costa Book of the Year award.
John Lyons is a Trinidad-born poet, painter, illustrator, educator and curator. He has worked as a theatre designer, exhibition adviser and as a teacher both of visual art and creative writing. As an art critic, he has written essays for catalogues, notably for Denzil Forrester's major touring exhibition Dub Transition, for Jouvert Print Exhibition and Tony Phillips' Jazz and The Twentieth Century.
Sarah Howe is a Chinese-British poet, editor and researcher in English literature. Her first full poetry collection, Loop of Jade (2015), won the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Sunday Times / Peters Fraser & Dunlop Young Writer of The Year Award. It is the first time that the T. S. Eliot Prize has been given to a debut collection. She is currently a Leverhulme Fellow in English at University College London, as well as a trustee of The Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry.
Rapture is a collection of poetry written by the Scottish poet Carol Ann Duffy, the British poet laureate from 2009 to 2019. It marks her 37th work of poetry and has been described as "intensely personal, emotional and elegiac, and markedly different from Duffy’s other works" by the British Council. Rapture was first published in 2005 in the UK by Picador, and in 2013 in the US, by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Jason Allen-Paisant is a Jamaican poet, writer and academic. His second collection of poems, Self-Portrait as Othello, won the 2023 T. S. Eliot Prize and the 2023 Forward Prize for Best Collection.
