Mapping the Future: Celebrating The Complete Works Poets - Members IN PERSON

Friday 25 October, 7-8:30pm, The British Library and online. Doors will open at 6PM. Free for RSL Members and Fellows. Not a Member? Join now! Public can be purchased from the British Library here from £10.

Come and join us for a unique evening of readings, where a host of prize-winning poets will celebrate a revolutionary initiative and the anthology Mapping the Future: The Complete Works Poets (Bloodaxe Books, 2023).

The groundbreaking Complete Works poetry mentoring scheme, founded by Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo in 2008, has transformed the UK poetry scene. Supporting 30 diverse poets in just 12 years, the programme has enabled them to find their distinctive voices — from Raymond Antrobus to Warsan Shire. The writers have gone on to produce over 40 published collections between them and to win major awards including three Forward Prizes, two TS Eliot Prizes and two Ted Hughes Awards.

Artists performing at this one-off London celebration are: prize-winning poets Mona Arshi, Nick Makoha and Yomi Ṣode, poet and translator Will Harris and Fulbright scholar and Royal Society of Literature Fellow Karen McCarthy-Woolf, with appearances by The Complete Works founder Bernardine Evaristo and director Dr Nathalie Teitler.

Mona Arshi is a poet, novelist and essayist. Mona trained as a human rights lawyer at Liberty before she started writing poetry which she studied at the University of East Anglia. Her debut collection Small Hands won the 2015 Forward Prize for Best First Collection. She has also been a prize winner in the Magma, Troubadour and Manchester creative writing competitions.

Bernardine Evaristo is the author of ten books and numerous other works including the 2019 Booker-winning novel, Girl, Woman, Other. She has set up many literature inclusion projects for writers and is the curator of the Black Britain: Writing Back book seriesfor Penguin, re-publishing thirteen books by Black British authors since 2020. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London and President of the Royal Society of Literature.

Will Harris is a London-based writer. He is the author of the poetry books Rendang (2020) and Brother Poem (2023). He co-translated Habib Tengour’s Consolatio (Poetry Translation Centre) with Delaina Haslam in 2022, and helps facilitate the Southbank New Poets Collective with Vanessa Kisuule. Siblings, a conversation between Harris, Jay Bernard, Mary Jean Chan and Nisha Ramayya, was published earlier this year by Monitor Books.

London-based Nick Makoha is a Malika’s Kitchen Fellow and Complete Works alumnus. His debut poetry book Kingdom of Gravity was shortlisted for the 2017 Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection. He won the 2015 Brunel International African Poetry prize and the 2016 Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize for his pamphlet Resurrection Man. Born in Uganda, Nick fled with his mother as a result of the political overtones that arose from the civil war during the Idi Amin dictatorship. He has lived in Kenya and Saudi Arabia.

Born in London to English and Jamaican parents, Dr Karen McCarthy Woolf is the author of three poetry collections, the ‘extraordinarily inventive’ (Bernardine Evaristo) verse novel Top Doll, and editor of seven literary anthologies. A Fulbright Scholar and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she was artist in residence at the Sacatar Institute, Brazil in 2021, researching sugar and its intimate ecological legacies. Her poems have been translated into various European languages and exhibited by Poems on the Underground.

Yomi Ṣode is an award-winning Nigerian-British writer. His debut collection Manorism was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2023 and the T S Eliot Prize 2022. Yomi is a Complete Works alumnus and a member of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen. He is the founder of BoxedIn, First Five, The Daddy Diaries and the mentorship programme 12 in 12.

Dr Nathalie Teitler HonFRSL has promoted diversity in UK literature for thirty years. She was the director of the Complete Works Poetry, an initiative of literary activist and Booker Prize-winning author Bernardine Evaristo. She co-founded the James Berry Poetry Prize for poets of colour (with Bloodaxe and Newcastle University), and is also co-founder and Director of Un Nuevo Sol, an organisation building a community of Latinx writers in the UK and beyond. She has edited several anthologies and journals and is writing her first novel Crossings, centred around tango dance and the world of Buenos Aires in 1900.

This event is a Speaking Volumes production in partnership with the Royal Society of Literature.