Mapping the Future: The Complete Works Poets

This event will take place in the British Library Knowledge Centre Pigott Theatre. It will be simultaneously live streamed on the British Library platform. Tickets may be booked either to attend in person (physical) or to watch on our platform (online) either live or within 48 hours on catch up. Viewing links for the online version will be sent out in the confirmation email you receive after booking. Captions are available for our online events and most in person events in the Pigott Theatre. If you have specific access requirements please email customer@bl.uk

You are warmly welcomed to an evening of readings by prize winning poets, in celebration of a revolutionary initiative: the Complete Works poetry mentoring scheme.

Founded by Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo in 2008 the groundbreaking programme has transformed poetry in the United Kingdom, supporting and enabling multiple diverse poets to find their distinctive voices; from Raymond Antrobus to Warsan Shire.

The writers have gone on to publish over 40 collections between them and to win major awards including three Forward Prizes, two TS Eliot Prizes and two Ted Hughes Awards. The anthology Mapping the Future: The Complete Works Poets, published last year by Bloodaxe Books is a remarkable collection of the work of this first group.

Artists performing at this one-off London and live streamed celebration are prizewinning poets Mona Arshi, Nick Makoha and Yomi Sode, poet and translator Will Harris and Fulbright scholar and Royal Society of Literature Fellow Karen McCarthy-Woolf, with appearances by The Complete Works founder Bernardine Evaristo and director Dr Nathalie Teitler.

Doors and Bar open at 18:00. If you’re attending in person, please arrive no later than 15 minutes before the start time of this event.

Half price tickets available for British Library Members, Students, Under 26 and other concession groups.

A Speaking Volumes production in partnership with the Royal Society of Literature.

 

Mona Arshi is a poet, novelist and essayist. Mona trained as a human rights lawyer at Liberty before she started writing poetry which she studied at the University of East Anglia. Her debut collection Small Hands won the 2015 Forward Prize for Best First Collection. She has also been a prize winner in the Magma, Troubadour and Manchester creative writing competitions.

Bernardine Evaristo is the author of ten books and numerous other works including the 2019 Booker-winning novel, Girl, Woman, Other. She has set up many literature inclusion projects for writers and is the curator of the Black Britain: Writing Back book series for Penguin, re-publishing thirteen books by Black British authors since 2020. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London and President of the Royal Society of Literature.

Will Harris is a London-based writer. He is the author of the poetry books Rendang (2020) and Brother Poem (2023). He co-translated Habib Tengour’s Consolatio (Poetry Translation Centre) with Delaina Haslam in 2022 and helps facilitate the Southbank New Poets Collective with Vanessa Kisuule. Siblings, a conversation between Harris, Jay Bernard, Mary Jean Chan and Nisha Ramayya, was published earlier this year by Monitor Books.

London-based Nick Makoha is a Malika’s Kitchen Fellow and Complete Works alumnus. His debut poetry book Kingdom of Gravity was shortlisted for the 2017 Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection. He won the 2015 Brunel International African Poetry prize and the 2016 Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize for his pamphlet Resurrection Man. Born in Uganda, Nick fled with his mother as a result of the political overtones that arose from the civil war during the Idi Amin dictatorship. He has lived in Kenya and Saudi Arabia.

Born in London to English and Jamaican parents, Dr Karen McCarthy Woolf is the author of three poetry collections, the ‘extraordinarily inventive’ (Bernardine Evaristo) verse novel Top Doll, and editor of seven literary anthologies. A Fulbright Scholar and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she was artist in residence at the Sacatar Institute, Brazil in 2021, researching sugar and its intimate ecological legacies. Her poems have been translated into various European languages and exhibited by Poems on the Underground.

Yomi Sode is an award-winning Nigerian-British writer. His debut collection Manorism was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2023 and the T S Eliot Prize 2022. Yomi is a Complete Works alumnus and a member of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen. He is the founder of BoxedIn, First Five, The Daddy Diaries and the mentorship programme 12 in 12.

Dr Nathalie Teitler HonFRSL has promoted diversity in UK literature for thirty years. She was the director of the Complete Works Poetry, an initiative of literary activist and Booker Prize-winning author Bernardine Evaristo. She co-founded the James Berry Poetry Prize for poets of colour (with Bloodaxe and Newcastle University), and is also co-founder and Director of Un Nuevo Sol, an organisation building a community of Latinx writers in the UK and beyond. She has edited several anthologies and journals and is writing her first novel Crossings, centred around tango dance and the world of Buenos Aires in 1900.

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