Benjamin Obadiah Iqbal Zephaniah was a British writer, dub poet, actor, musician and professor of poetry and creative writing. He was included in The Times list of Britain's top 50 post-war writers in 2008. In his work, Zephaniah drew on his lived experiences of incarceration, racism and his Jamaican heritage.
Kate Anna Rusby is an English folk singer-songwriter from Penistone, West Riding of Yorkshire, England. Sometimes called the "Barnsley Nightingale", she has headlined various British folk festivals, and is one of the best known contemporary English folk singers. In 2001 The Guardian described her as "a superstar of the British acoustic scene." In 2007 the BBC website described her as "The first lady of young folkies". She is one of the few folk singers to have been nominated for the Mercury Prize.
Big Dada is a British independent record label imprint distributed by Ninja Tune. It was started by reputed hip hop journalist Will Ashon in 1997. It is best known for marketing of prominent British hip hop artist Roots Manuva, poet and playwright Kae Tempest, grime pioneer Wiley, rapper and designer DELS and Mercury Prize winners Speech Debelle and Young Fathers.
Picador is an imprint of Pan Macmillan in the United Kingdom and Australia and of Macmillan Publishing in the United States. Both companies are owned by Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group.
Michael Wayne Rosen is an English children's author, poet, presenter, political columnist, broadcaster, activist, and academic, who is a professor of children's literature in the Department of Educational Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has written over 200 books for children and adults. Select books include We're Going on a Bear Hunt (1989) and Sad Book (2004). He served as Children's Laureate from June 2007 to June 2009. He won the 2023 PEN Pinter Prize, awarded by English PEN, for his "fearless" body of work.
Claudia Rankine is an American poet, essayist, playwright, and the editor of several anthologies. She is the author of five volumes of poetry, two plays and various essays.
Carl Phillips is an American writer and poet. He is a professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. In 2023, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020.
Daniel De Mussenden Carey is an English record producer, songwriter, mixer and remixer. He owns his own studio in South London and runs the record label Speedy Wunderground.
Anthony Anaxagorou is a British-born Cypriot poet, writer, publisher and educator.
Omar bin Musa is a Malaysian-Australian author, poet, rapper, and visual artist from Queanbeyan, New South Wales. He has released four hip hop records, four books of poetry, and the novel Here Come the Dogs, which was long-listed for the Miles Franklin Award and the International Dublin Literary Award. Musa was named one of the Sydney Morning Herald's Young Novelists of the Year in 2015.
The Ted Hughes Award was an annual literary prize given to a living UK poet for new work in poetry. It was awarded each spring in recognition of a work from the previous year. It was a project which ran alongside Carol Ann Duffy's tenure as Poet Laureate, which ended when Duffy finished her 10 years as Poet Laureate in 2019
Next Generation poets (2014) are a list of poets named in 2014 by a panel for the Poetry Book Society, which once every ten years selects 20 poets "expected to dominate the poetry landscape of the coming decade." The accolade highlights emerging poets in the UK and Ireland who published a first collection of poetry within the previous decade.
Everybody Down is the debut album by English poet and spoken word artist Kae Tempest, which was nominated for the 2014 Mercury Prize. Its tracks comprise a unified story cycle with a coherent narrative arc, based upon a main character named Becky.
Benjamin Gerard Coyle-Larner, known professionally as Loyle Carner, is an English hip hop musician. After supporting various rappers during their tours, he released his debut album, Yesterday's Gone, in 2017, which garnered a nomination for the 2017 Mercury Prize. He released his second album, Not Waving, but Drowning, in April 2019, and his third, hugo, in October 2022. Carner has been nominated for three Brit Awards.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Let Them Eat Chaos is the second studio album by English poet and spoken word artist Kae Tempest, the follow-up to their Mercury Prize-nominated debut Everybody Down. The album follows seven individuals who all live on the same street who have never met each other before. But then at 4:18 in the morning, a storm causes these seven people to leave their homes and see each other for the very first time.
Joelle Taylor RSL is a poet, playwright and author. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022.
Raymond Antrobus is a British poet, educator and writer, who has been performing poetry since 2007. In March 2019, he won the Ted Hughes Award for new work in poetry. In May 2019, Antrobus became the first poet to win the Rathbones Folio Prize for his collection The Perseverance, praised by chair of the judges as "an immensely moving book of poetry which uses his deaf experience, bereavement and Jamaican-British heritage to consider the ways we all communicate with each other." Antrobus was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2020.
The Book of Traps and Lessons is the third studio album by English poet and spoken word artist Kae Tempest, the follow-up to Let Them Eat Chaos. According to NME's El Hunt: "The figures closest to this record’s protagonist constantly take the form of gnarled trees: fingers become delicate twiglets, and naked toes set down roots. And togetherness is the force that continually grounds ‘The Book of Traps and Lessons’ despite the dystopian soldiers that march across its drenched landscape." The spoken word lyrics contain a mix of hope and love, mirrored against the difficulties in today's society.
The 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition". The prize was announced by the Swedish Academy on 13 October 2016. He is the 12th Nobel laureate from the United States.
