Fred D’Aguiar
Fred D’Aguiar writes across genres: poetry, fiction, plays and essays. His first novel, The Longest Memory (1994), won both the David Higham Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread First Novel Award, and his third novel, Feeding the Ghosts (1997), was inspired by the true story of the Zong massacre in which 132 slaves were thrown from a slave ship into the Atlantic for insurance purposes. His most recent novel, his sixth, is about Jonestown, and titled, Children of Paradise (HarperCollins 2014). Fred began, though, as a poet and wishes to end as one. His most recent poetry collection, his sixth, is The Rose of Toulouse (Carcanet, UK, 2013). Born in London, Fred grew up in Guyana and returned to London in his teens. He is currently Director of the undergraduate creative writing programme at UCLA. |
Nick Makoha
Nick Makoha’s debut collection Kingdom of Gravity was shortlisted for the 2017 Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection, and nominated by The Guardian as one of the best books of 2017. Nick is a Cave Canem Graduate Fellow and Complete Works Alumni. He won the 2015 Brunel International African Poetry prize and is the 2016 winner of the Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize for his pamphlet Resurrection Man. His poems have appeared in The New York Times, Poetry Review, and Callaloo. He is a Creative Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Goldsmiths, working to create an in-depth online digital archive of the Metic experiences of Black British Writers, a Trustee for the Arvon Foundation and The Ministry of Stories and a member of the Malika’s Poetry Kitchen collective. |