“My work straddles so many things. You know, it’s poetry, but it’s also music. What I do is poetry with an Afro-Caribbean jazz soundtrack. It’s essentially very political, passionate, and it’s something different.”
A poet, novelist and musician
Biography
Anthony Joseph is an award winning Trinidad-born poet, novelist, academic and musician. He is the author of four poetry collections and three novels. His 2018 novel Kitch: A Fictional Biography of a Calypso Icon was shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award, and long listed for the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. His experimental novel The Frequency of Magic was published in 2019, the year he was also awarded a Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship.
In 2020 a Polish translation of his afrofuturist novel The African Origins of UFOs was published, followed by a Spanish edition of Kitch. As a musician, he has released eight critically acclaimed albums, and in 2020 received a Paul Hamblyn Foundation Composers Award. He holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Goldsmiths University and is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Kings College, London. His new collection Sonnets for Albert was published by Bloomsbury in June 2022 and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection and won the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry.
