His numerous books included two influential anthologies of Caribbean and Black British poetry, Bluefoot Traveller (1976) and News for Babylon (1984). His Bloodaxe retrospective A Story I Am In: Selected Poems (2011) draws on five previous collections published by New Beacon Books, Oxford University Press and Bloodaxe Books. His collection Windrush Songs (2007) was published to mark the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade. He also published several books of poetry and stories for children, and was made an OBE in 1990 for services to poetry. He was especially generous in supporting new and emerging poets of colour in Britain.

James also inspired and helped younger poets who came after him, most notably Raymond Antrobus and Hannah Lowe, who returned the favour by giving him their personal support in his later years.

Judges

Neil Astley is the editor of Bloodaxe Books which he founded in 1978. His books include many anthologies, most notably those in the Staying Alive series: Staying Alive (2002), Being Alive (2004), Being Human (2011) and Staying Human (2020), along with three collaborations with Pamela Robertson-Pearce, Soul Food and the DVD-books In Person: 30 Poets and In Person: World Poets. He received an Eric Gregory Award for his poetry, and has published two poetry collections, Darwin Survivor and Biting My Tongue, as well as two novels, The End of My Tether (shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award), and The Sheep Who Changed the World. He was given a D.Litt from Newcastle University for his work with Bloodaxe Books in 1995; is a patron and past trustee of Ledbury Poetry Festival; and was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018. He lives in the Tarset valley in Northumberland.

Dr Nathalie Teitler HFRSL has worked promoting inclusivity in British arts, primarily literature/poetry, for 30 years. She is the Director of the Complete Works Poetry, founded by Bernardine Evaristo OBE; a mentoring and development programme that has had a significant impact on the level of Black, Asian & Latinx poets published by major UK publishers (less than 1% in 2007, it is now 22%). Born in Argentina, she is also the co-founder of Nuevo Sol- A New Sun- (along with poet Leo Boix) an organisation promoting British Latinx and Latinx/ Latin American writers around the world. 2019 she founded a new international writers collective, The Bridge for Black and Latinx poets around the world (brown, LGBTQI/disabled poets also welcome) which now has over 100 members. She also founded a dance poetry organisation, Dancing Words, in 2017 that has made a series of poetry dance films that have been seen at festivals around the world. Nathalie is also the manager of the Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowships.  She is currently working on a tango-based novel, set in Buenos Aires in 1900.

Sinéad Morrissey is the author of six collections. Her awards include a Lannan Literary Fellowship, First Prize in the UK National Poetry Competition, the Irish Times Poetry Now Award and the T S Eliot Prize. In 2016 she received the E M Foster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her latest collection, On Balance, received the Forward Prize in 2017 and the European Poet of Freedom Award in 2020. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2019. She has served as Belfast Poet Laureate, and is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University.

Theresa Muñoz is a Canadian-born poet of Spanish and Filipino descent, now living in Edinburgh. She holds a PhD in Scottish Literature from Glasgow University. She is a Research Associate at the Newcastle Centre for Literary Arts at Newcastle University, where she teaches Creative Writing. Her work has appeared in several journals, including Poetry Review, Canadian Literature and Arc magazine.  She has one poetry collection, Settle which shortlisted for the Melita Hume Poetry Prize. In 2018 she won a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship and a Muriel Spark Centenary Award, and in 2020 she received a Creative Scotland Award to write one of the first poetry sequences on inter-racial couples, entitled ‘Mixed Feelings’.

Jacob Sam-La Rose is a poet, editor and educator. His poetry has been translated into Portuguese, Latvian, French and Dutch, and his collection 'Breaking Silence' was shortlisted for a Fenton Aldeburgh award and a Forward Poetry prize. He has served as an artistic director for the Spoken Word Education Programme (post-graduate training and accreditation for poet-educators), Shake the Dust (a national youth poetry festival) and countless other creative development initiatives for young and emerging poets. He has delivered programmes, performances and commissioned works for the British Council, Raffles Institution (Singapore), the Open Book Festival (Cape Town), the Ministry of Education (Malaysia), the London School of Economics, Southbank Centre, the National Theatre, the Arvon Foundation, the Arts Council and more. For 2021, Sam-La Rose maintains a role as a poetry professor for Guildhall School of Music and Drama, leads the Barbican Young Poets programme (which he founded in 2009) and continues research into speculative futures for poetic composition through code and generative text.

Mentors

Malika Booker is a poetry lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, a British poet of Guyanese and Grenadian Parentage and the founder of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen. Her pamphlet Breadfruit, (flippedeye, 2007) received a Poetry Society recommendation and her poetry collection Pepper Seed (Peepal Tree Press, 2013) was shortlisted for the OCM Bocas prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre 2014 prize for first full collection. She is published with the Poets Sharon Olds and Warsan Shire in The Penguin Modern Poet Series 3:Your Family: Your Body (2017) and her poem Nine Nights, first published in The Poetry Review in autumn 2016, was shortlisted for Best Single Poem in the 2017 Forward Prize.  Malika  currently hosts and curates Peepal Tree Press’s Literary podcast. A Cave Canem Fellow, and inaugural Poet in Residence at The Royal Shakespeare Company, Malika was awarded the Cholmondeley Award (2019) for outstanding contribution to poetry, and her poem The Little Miracles, commissioned by and published in Magma 75(autumn 2019) won The Forward Prize for Best Single Poem (2020). Malika received her MA from Goldsmiths University and has recently begun a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle.

Mimi Khalvati was born in Tehran and has lived most of her life in London.  She has published nine collections with Carcanet Press, including The Meanest Flower, shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize 2007, and Child: New and Selected Poems 1991-2011, a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation.  She was poet in residence at the Royal Mail and has held fellowships with the Royal Literary Fund at City University and at the International Writing Program in Iowa. Her awards include a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors and a major Arts Council Writer’s Award. She is the founder of The Poetry School, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of The English Society. Her most recent collection, Afterwardness (Carcanet 2019), a series of Petrarchan sonnets, is a Poetry Book Society Winter Wild Card and a book of the year in The Sunday Times and The Guardian.

Mona Arshi worked as a Human rights lawyer at Liberty before she started writing poetry. Her debut collection Small Hands won the Forward Prize for best first collection in 2015. Mona’s second collection ‘Dear Big Gods’ was published in 2019 (both books published by Liverpool University Press’s Pavilion Poetry list). She has taught and mentored extensively including the Arvon/Jerwood mentorship Programme  and the  Rebecca Swift Women’s Poetry Prize. Mona has judged both the  Forward and TS Eliot prizes as well as  the National Poetry Competition . She  makes regular appearances on radio and  has been commissioned to write both poems and short stories.  Her poems and interviews have been published in The Times, The Guardian, Granta and The Times of India as well as on the London Underground. She is currently writer in Residence at Cley Marshes with the Norfolk Wildlife Trust. Her debut novel Somebody Loves You will be  published with And Other Stories  in Autumn 2021. She has recently been appointed Honorary Professor at the University of Liverpool. https://www.monaarshi.com/