Raymond Antrobus
Photo © Suki Dhanda
Raymond Antrobus is a poet and writer from London. He is the author of To Sweeten Bitter (Out-Spoken Press) and The Perseverance (Penned In The Margins). Raymond’s children’s picture book, Can Bears Ski?, illustrated by Polly Dunbar, was published by Walker Books in 2021 and his poetry collection, All the Names Given, was published Picador in 2021.
The Perseverance won the Rathbones Folio Prize, the Ted Hughes Award, the Somerset Maugham Award and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award in 2019. It 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.
His poetry collection, Signs, Music, about fatherhood and masculinity, will be published in September 2024 by Picador in the UK and Tin House in the US, and his debut non-fiction work, An Investigation of Missing Sound will be published by W&N in the UK and Hogarth in the US in spring 2025.
In 2018 he was awarded The Poetry Society’s Geoffrey Dearmer Prize, judged by Ocean Vuong, for his poem ‘Sound Machine’.
His poetry has been published in POETRY, The Poetry Review, Poets.org, The Deaf Poets Society, News 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 is the first recipient of the UEA/Rathbones Folio Creative Writing Fellowship.
