Vahni Capildeo

Vahni Anthony Ezekiel Capildeo (born Surya Vahni Priya Capildeo, 1973) is a Trinidad and Tobago-born British writer, and a member of the extended Capildeo family that has produced notable Trinidadian politicians and writers (including V. S. Naipaul, a cousin of Capildeo's, and Neil Bissoondath).

Biography Born in 1973 in Port of Spain, Trinidad, Capildeo has lived in Scotland since 2017, and the United Kingdom since 1991.

They read English at Christ Church, Oxford, and were subsequently awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to pursue graduate work in Old Norse and translation theory, also at Christ Church/the Faculty of English Language and Literature, towards their DPhil, Reading Egils saga Skallagrímssonar: saga, paratext, translations (2001).

They intermitted from a Research Fellowship at Girton College, Cambridge, in 2000–04 to spend time in Trinidad and Jamaica. This produced No Traveller Returns (Salt, 2003), a book-length poem sequence characterised by a reviewer as "a discontinuous meditation on identity and self-awareness. These are merciless poems – mercilessly observant, mercilessly precise",

Person Animal Figure, a set of 45 dramatic monologues in three voices, was published by Jeremy Noel-Tod's Landfill Press in 2005 (http://www.landfillpress.co.uk ).

Undraining Sea (completed 2005), a third poetry collection, was published in 2009. Described in one review as "a wholly recommendable collection", it is a three-section book that actively engages with William Carlos Williams's Paterson. This was followed in 2012 by Dark and Unaccustomed Words (completed 2008), which takes its title from George Puttenham's 16th-century Arte of Poesie. This was Puttenham's critical term for arcane or foreign imports into English. The collection was longlisted for the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. These poems demonstrate, for example, the feeling and scope of certain parts of speech (prepositions, adjectives), forms, voices, or attitudes. Rights for both books (originally published by Eggbox) have reverted to the author.

A fifth book, Utter, was published by Peepal Tree Press in 2013. Reviewing the collection in The Caribbean Review of Books, Vivek Narayanan wrote: "What we have here is not a set of conceits, or even concerns, but a system and a mythos entire, one that is delivered to us with such continuous and consistent lyrical intensity, both classical and contemporary, that it can appear as fissures of lightning on the page." David Caddy in the magazine Tears in the Fence said: "Reading Vahni Capildeo’s Utter ... is an absolute joy, displaying the range and registers that the best of contemporary poetry should exhibit more fully. Capildeo is both Trinidadian and universal."

Simple Complex Shapes, published by Tony Frazer's Shearsman Books in 2015, was written during Capildeo's time as the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow in the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge. Jamie Osborn notes that this work " can be taken as a sequence of poems or one long poem describing a series of flights and falls from the moment of a touch in the dark through a day or days, a tangle of time, back into a dreaming sleep."

Capildeo has worked at Oxfam Head Office and for the Oxford Sexual Abuse and Rape Crisis Centre as a volunteer and a volunteer trainer; for the Oxford English Dictionary; and they have taught at the Universities of Leeds (2009), Greenwich (2009), Sheffield (2009–10), Kingston upon Thames (2010–11), and Glasgow (2012–13). They are a Contributing Editor at the Caribbean Review of Books (edited by Nicholas Laughlin). They were part of the team of Commonwealth Writers, the cultural initiative of the Commonwealth Foundation, in 2013–14.

Awards In 2016, Capildeo became the third Caribbean poet in a row – after Jamaican-born poets Kei Miller and Claudia Rankine – to win the Forward Prize for best poetry collection, with Measures of Expatriation. The Chair of the Forward jury, Malika Booker, said: "Vahni Capildeo’s Measure of Expatriation is a work that amazes. We found a vertiginous excitement in the way in which the book grasps its subject: the sense of never quite being at home. This is poetry that transforms. When people in the future seek to know what it's like to live between places, traditions, habits and cultures, they will read this. Here is the language for what expatriation feels like."

In 2018, Capildeo received the Cholmondeley Award for poetry, from the Society of Authors.

In 2019, Capildeo was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

In 2025, Capileo was named as the recipient of a Windham-Campbell Literature Prize in the poetry category.

Capildeo's Polkadot Wounds (2024) was the winner of the poetry category of the 2025 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. It was also awarded Poetry Book of the Year in Scotland's National Book Awards.