Raymond Antrobus

Raymond Antrobus is a British-Jamaican poet born in 1986 in Hackney, East London. He is deaf and has been open about his experience of growing up d/Deaf in a hearing world. He studied at Goldsmiths, University of London, and is one of the co-founders of the poetry night Chill Pill. The Perseverance (2018, Penned in the Margins) is his debut full poetry collection, named after a pub in Hackney where his Jamaican-born father drank, and exploring deafness, grief for his late father, Blackness, and the intersecting identities of being British and Deaf. It won the Rathbones Folio Prize in 2019 and the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, and was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award. His second collection All the Names Given (2021) continued his exploration of deafness, language, and identity. Antrobus has been a significant advocate for disability representation in poetry and has worked extensively in schools and communities.