The Coronet Theatre in association with Renaissance One presents Poetry Club, a special evening featuring Jason Allen-Paisant, Malika Booker and Zaffar Kunial, three of the finest poets of their generation for a spell-binding evening of poetry.
The event is also the London book launch of Allen-Paisant’s latest poetry collection, Self-Portrait as Othello (Carcanet) – a reimagining of Shakespeare’s Othello for the modern age, intertwining the identities of ‘immigrant’ and ‘black’.
Books will be available for purchase and signing in the bar afterwards where all are welcome to stay for a drink and chat to the poets.
Jason Allen-Paisant is a poet and academic from Jamaica and currently living in Leeds. His first poetry collection Thinking with Trees (Carcanet, 2021) won the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for poetry and was an Irish Times and White Review Book of the Year 2021. He is a Senior Lecturer in Critical Theory & Creative Writing, English and American Studies at the University of Manchester.
‘Jason Allen-Paisant deftly inscribes his own signature on worlds inner and outer in these gorgeous poems. The future of Caribbean lyric poetry is in great hands’ Lorna Goodison
Malika Booker is a writer, poet, multidisciplinary artist, and creative writing lecturer. Her first collection of poetry, Pepper Seed (Peepal Tree Press, 2013) was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre prize. She has won the Forward Prize twice, in 2017 and 2020, for Best Single Poem. She was the inaugural Poet In Residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company and in 2019, received a Cholmondeley Award for her outstanding contribution to poetry.
‘a pioneer of the present spoken word movement in the UK.’ Lemn Sissay
Zaffar Kunial reads from his TS Eliot Prize 2023 shortlisted collection England’s Green, in which we are invited to look at the place and the language we think we know, and we are made to think again. In 2014, he published a pamphlet in the Faber New Poets series, was awarded The Poetry Society’s Geoffrey Dearmer Prize and was Poet-in-Residence at the Wordsworth Trust. His debut collection, Us (Faber, 2018), was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and other awards. Zaffar Kunial was born in Birmingham and lives in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire.
‘…there’s something about the precise, thoughtful, unhurried way in which he interrogates language that marks him out as a unique talent. As the Scottish poet Jackie Kay has said, he is a real find.’ The Scotsman
