News

The Poetry School recently teamed up with Spread the Word to relaunch the successful project Flight, a mentoring scheme set up for young writers offering them support and guidance with published writers, culminating with a showcase of the writers reading their work in mid-June. 

One of Flight's most prestigious alumni writers is the poet Dean Atta, whose recent poem 'I am Nobody's Nigger' - written in response to the Stephen Lawrence murder enquiry - went viral online. He received attention in the Guardian and the Huffington Post and his poem is has been circulated many more times than the Poet Laureate's. We caught up with him to talk about about his viral poem, the mentoring scheme that changed his life, and Carol Ann Duffy.

Siddhartha Bose's debut collection of poems, Kalagora was published by Penned in the Margins in 2010. His play by the same name was performed in Edinburgh in 2011 to critical acclaim. In this play, and in his upcoming workshop with The Poetry School, Siddhartha focuses on the idea of the Megacity: how poets through history have responded to, written about and recreated the endless stimuli of urban living. Here, we talk to him about the definition of a Megacity, his poetry book of the same name and Baudelaire.

Merry Christmas everyone!

We caught up with Poetry School student Mark Burnhope to talk about Blakean influence, being a 'religious poet' and fever dreams. Mark was born in 1982 and studied at London School of Theology before completing an MA in Creative Writing at Brunel University. His work has appeared in a variety of print and online publications. He currently lives and writes in Bournemouth, Dorset with his partner, four stepchildren, two geckos and a greyhound. The Snowboy (Salt) is his debut poetry pamphlet. 

Malika Booker is a British writer and multidisciplinary artist of Guyanese and Grenadian Parentage. Her poems have been widely published in anthologies and journals including Wasafiri, The Penguin Anthology of New Black Writing, and Ten New Poets (Bloodaxe, 2010). Her CV is a flurrey of writerly activity, and we're lucky enough to have her teaching for us in the Spring Term on a course 'Mapping Poetries', the idea for which actually came out of a Poetry School workshop that Malika took as a student. Here, she talks to us about 'Malika's Kitchen', geographical hybrids and her next collection.