Roger Robinson

Roger Robinson is a British-Trinidadian poet born in 1967 in Trinidad, who has lived in London for much of his adult life. He is also a musician, performer, and arts educator who has worked extensively in schools and communities. He is a co-founder of the writing collective Malika's Kitchen. A Portable Paradise (2019, Peepal Tree Press) is his third collection of poetry, named after the idea that if you carry your paradise within you, no one can take it from you. The collection responds to the Grenfell Tower fire of 2017 and to the experience of Black British life, combining elegy, social critique, and lyric beauty. It won the RSL Ondaatje Prize in 2020, the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry in 2019, and the Ted Hughes Award. Robinson is also the author of Suitcase (2004) and The Butterfly Hotel (2013). He is known for the accessibility and emotional directness of his poetry, which draws on Caribbean oral tradition as well as Anglo-American lyric. He holds honorary doctorates from Sheffield Hallam University and has been widely recognised as one of the leading British poets of his generation.