Raymond Antrobus

Raymond Antrobus (born 1986) is a British poet, educator and writer who has been performing poetry since 2007. In March 2019, he won the Ted Hughes Award for new work in poetry. In May 2019, Antrobus became the first poet to win the Rathbones Folio Prize for his collection The Perseverance, praised by chair of the judges as "an immensely moving book of poetry which uses his deaf experience, bereavement and Jamaican-British heritage to consider the ways we all communicate with each other." Antrobus was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2020.

Biography Early years Raymond Antrobus was born in 1986 in Homerton Hospital, Hackney, East London, England, to an English mother and a Jamaican father who in the 1960s had immigrated to England to work. As a young child, Antrobus was thought to have learning difficulties, until his deafness was discovered when he was six years old.

Antrobus's father had been born in rural Jamaica, one of seven brothers, and at the age of three had been sent to live with an aunt in Kingston, then after his own father had moved to England, he was sent for and settled there, meeting Antrobus's mother at a squatters' party in London. Though separating from her early on, Antrobus's father remained living locally. In 2015, he was shortlisted for Young Poet Laureate of London.

Interviewed in 2016, he said: "I've had many jobs working in removals, gyms, swimming pools, security, etc, but now I make my living off teaching and touring my poetry... and I've never felt more useful working in education as a Jamaican British poet."

From 2010 to 2018, Antrobus was a founding member of Chill Pill at The Albany in Deptford as well as of the Keats House Poets Forum, and co-curated shows featuring such people as Kae Tempest, Sabrina Mahfouz, Inua Ellams, Kayo Chingyoni, Warsan Shire, Anthony Anaxagorou and Hannah Lowe. Antrobus has read and performed at major UK festivals and internationally, including in South Africa, Kenya, North America, Sweden, Italy, Germany and Switzerland, and has held multiple residencies in schools, as well as at Pupil Referral Units.

His work has been widely published in many literary magazines, journals and other outlets, among them BBC 2, BBC Radio 4, Poetry Review, New Statesman, Poetry, The Deaf Poets Society, The Big Issue, The Jamaica Gleaner and The Guardian. In 2019, he headlined the London Book Fair as "Poet of the Fair".

In April 2022, Antrobus featured (alongside Margaret Busby) in a Backlisted podcast about Jamaican writer Andrew Salkey and his 1960 novel Escape to An Autumn Pavement.

Writing In 2012, Burning Eye Books published the pamphlet Shapes & Disfigurements of Raymond Antrobus, about which one reviewer wrote: "Exploring themes of outsider introspection, family connections, love and tangential inspiration, bestriding the continents in search of the answers to the keys questions, it's a chapbook that summons a chest-swelling furore of emotions." His second pamphlet, To Sweeten Bitter — "a very personal exploration of the father/son relationship" — came out in 2017, the same year as his poem "Sound Machine", first published in The Poetry Review, won the Geoffrey Dearmer Award, judged by Ocean Vuong. The Perseverance was also shortlisted for the Griffin Prize, the Jhalak Prize, and the Somerset Maugham Award, and was chosen as Poetry Book of the Year by both The Guardian and The Sunday Times, and Book of the Year by the Poetry School. In December 2019, The Perseverance was awarded the Sunday Times/University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award.

Antrobus wrote his first picture book, Can Bears Ski? (2020), after being unable to find any children's titles with a deaf protagonist.

His first non-fiction book, The Quiet Ear: An Investigation of Missing Sound: A Memoir, was published in 2025, receiving widely positive critical attention. . Colin Grant noted in The Observer: "The Quiet Ear is dark and often heart-rending. But it is a testament to Antrobus's creativity and mirrors his poetry." Voice Magazine concluded: "Antrobus writes with lyrical precision and honesty, offering a narrative that is both personal and universally resonant. His exploration of sound and silence lingers on the page, urging readers to rethink how they experience the world and the people within it. The Quiet Ear is a book that listens to the past while shaping how we imagine the future." The book was described in The New York Times as "an insightful, bighearted memoir ... a nuanced discussion of the ways that race and deafness intersect", with the reviewer stating: The Quiet Ear' is a transformative story for all readers, offering an opportunity to discover the missing sounds and misunderstandings of their own experience — and begin to comprehend what it means to truly listen."

Influence and recognition

Antrobus was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2021 New Year Honours for services to literature.

In June 2022, Antrobus's poems "The Perseverance" and "Happy Birthday Moon" were added to the UK's OCR GCSE syllabus.

In April 2022, Rose Ayling-Ellis, deaf actress and winner of Strictly Come Dancing, made history by signing a BSL version of Antrobus's children's picture book Can Bears Ski? on CBeebies – the first airing of a story told entirely in British Sign Language. That same month Ayling-Ellis signed and performed Antrobus's poem "Dear Hearing World" at the BSL rally on Trafalgar Square in support of the BSL Act.

Antrobus was on the 2023 PEN Pinter Prize judging panel, alongside Ruth Borthwick and Amber Massie-Blomfield, when the award was won by Michael Rosen.

Antrobus was nominated for the 2024 T. S. Eliot Prize, alongside Karen McCarthy Woolf, Carl Phillips, Gboyega Odubanjo, Rachel Mann and others.

On April 14, 2026, Antrobus was named a Guggenheim Fellow.

Personal life Through his mother's lineage, Antrobus is distantly related to the English poet Thomas Gray.

In April 2019, Antrobus married Tabitha, a photographer and art conservator from New Orleans, with whom he collaborates. Their son was born in 2021.

Selected works

Poems

"Status", And Other Poems, 7 June 2013. "To Sweeten Bitter", Magma Poetry, 2015. "Dear Hearing World", The Deaf Poets Society, 2016. "His Heart", And Other Poems, 15 November 2016. "Sound Machine", The Poetry Review, 107:1, Spring 2017; The Poetry Society. Winner of Geoffrey Dearmer Award. "Echo" (podcast), Poetry, 6 March 2017. "I Move through London Like a Hotep", Poetry, May 2018. "Ode To My Hair", Wildness Journal, issue 14, 2018. "Maybe I Could Love a Man", MOKO: Caribbean Arts & Letters, 2018. "After Being Called A Fucking Foreigner in London Fields", New Statesman, 24 October 2018. "For Rashan Charles", Poets.org, February 2019. "Maybe my most important identity is being a son", Poetry Foundation, March 2019. "Happy Birthday Moon", Forward Arts Foundation, 2019 (from The Perseverance).

Articles , Apples and Snakes blog, 2014. "Echo (A Deaf Sequence)", Poetry Magazine, 9 March 2017. "Raymond Antrobus at Kingston Book Festival", British Council, Literature blog, 22 March 2018.

Pamphlets 2012: Shapes & Disfigurements of Raymond Antrobus – chapbook (Burning Eye Books) 2017: To Sweeten Bitter – chapbook, Foreword by Margaret Busby (Outspoken Press)

Books 2018: The Perseverance (Penned in the Margins, ) 2020: Can Bears Ski? illus. Polly Dunbar (Walker Books, ) 2021: All The Names Given (Picador, ) 2024: Signs, Music (Picador, ) 2025: The Quiet Ear: An Investigation of Missing Sound: A Memoir (Hogarth Press, )

Radio documentaries 2021: Inventions In Sound (BBC Radio 4, prod. Eleanor McDowall) 2022: Recaptive number 11,407 (BBC World Service, prod. Ant Adeane)

Awards 2017: Geoffrey Dearmer Award from the Poetry Society for poem "Sound Machine" 2017: inaugural Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship 2019: Ted Hughes Award for The Perseverance 2019: Rathbones Folio Prize for The Perseverance 2019: Somerset Maugham Award for The Perseverance 2019: Sunday Times/University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award for The Perseverance 2020: Fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature 2021: Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) 2021: Ezra Jack Keats Book Award (Honouree) for Can Bears Ski? 2021: Third Coast International Audio Festival, Best Documentary for Inventions in Sound (A Falling Tree Production for BBC Radio 4) 2022: Lucille Clifton Legacy Award (presented by Carolyn Forché) 2026: Guggenheim Fellowship