The stunning debut collections by two rising stars of poetry – Raymond Antrobus and Jay Bernard – move the voices of marginalised people to front and centre.

Winner of the TS Eliot Prize, Raymond’s The Perseverance explores his relationship with his father alongside the D/deaf experience, rewriting versions presented by the hearing. In Surge, Jay links the deaths in the New Cross Fire of 1981 and Grenfell Tower, highlighting the repetition of history, institutional silence and lack of accountability.

Raymond is a British Jamaican poet and winner of the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize. Jay is a London-based writer and activist, whose multimedia performance piece Surge: Side A was the winner of the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry 2018.

This event will be BSL interpreted.