Raymond Antrobus
Photo © Lily Bertrand-Webb
Raymond Antrobus is a British-Jamaican poet, educator and writer from London. He is the author of the poetry collections, To Sweeten Bitter (Out-Spoken Press, 2017), The Perseverance (Penned In The Margins, 2018), All the Names Given (Picador, 2021), and Signs, Music (Picador/Tin House, 2024). His children’s picture book, Can Bears Ski?, illustrated by Polly Dunbar, was published by Walker Books in 2021.
He became the first poet to win the Rathbones Folio Prize in 2019 with The Perseverance and and was the first recipient of the UEA/Rathbones Folio Creative Writing Fellowship. He has won the Ted Hughes Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, and the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. The Perseverance was shortlisted for the Griffin Prize, the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Jhalak Prize, and the Michael Murphy Prize. It was also named the Poetry Book Society’s ‘Winter Choice’, Guardian Poetry Book of the Year, Sunday Times Poetry Book of the Year, and Poetry School Book of the Year. In 2018 he was awarded The Poetry Society’s Geoffrey Dearmer Prize, judged by Ocean Vuong, for his poem ‘Sound Machine’.
Signs, Music, about fatherhood and masculinity, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and was a Poetry Book Society autumn choice. His debut non-fiction work, The Quiet Ear: An Investigation of Missing Sound was published by W&N in the UK and Hogarth in the US in spring 2025.
His poetry has been published in The New Yorker, POETRY, The Poetry Review, Poets.org, The Deaf Poets Society, The New Statesman, and The Guardian among others.
He is a founding member of ‘Chill Pill’ and ‘Keats House Poets Forum’ and the recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, Complete Works 3 and Jerwood Compton Poetry. He is also one of the world’s first recipients of an MA in Spoken Word Education from Goldsmiths University. He has served as an ambassador for The Poetry School and Arts Emergency and was a board member of English PEN. Currently, he advocates for D/deaf charities, including Deaf Kidz International, the National Deaf Children’s Society and the Royal National Institute for Deaf People. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2020 and appointed MBE for services to literature in 2021.
