Search results for ""Author Roger Robinson""

Roger Robinson recently came to the attention of UK audiences in the Bloodaxe anthology Ten, hailed by Carol Ann Duffy as "a joyful and important moment in publishing".The Butterfly Hotel is his first full collection of poetry, a telling document of the immigrant experience, from the 1980s to the present day, and the realities of uprooted culture. Butterflies hold a symbolic importance throughout, fragile yet ideal, adapting to survive.Roger Robinson is a writer and performer who lives in London. His one-man shows are The Shadow Boxer, Letter from My Father's Brother and Prohibition, all of which premiered at the British Festival of Visual Theatre at Battersea Arts Centre. He has received writing commissions from Stratford Theatre Royal East, the National Trust, the National Portrait Gallery and the Tate. His poetry has appeared in the Flipped Eye pamphlets Suitcase (2005; ISBN 9780954224776) and Suckle (2009; ISBN 9781905233212), the latter winning the Peoples Book Prize, and in the Bloodaxe anthology Ten, edited by Bernardine Evaristo and Daljit Nagra (2010; ISBN 9781852248796).

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Roger Robinson’s range is wide: the joys and pains of family life; observations on the threatening edge of violence below the surface energies of Black British territories in London; memories of an older Trinidad and visits that tell him both how he and the country have changed; emblematic poems on the beauty and often bizarre strangeness of the world of animals; quizzical responses to the strange, the heartening, and the appalling in incidents encountered in daily life; reflections on the purposes and costs of making art, as in fine poems on a George Stubbs’ painting, cocaine and Coltrane’s Ascension, and questioning thoughts on the ideologies of Toni Morrison and John Milton. The poems express a fierce anger against injustice, but also convey the irrepressible sense that Roger Robinson cannot help but love people for their humour, oddity and generosity of spirit.'With A Portable Paradise, Roger Robinson shows us that he can be the voice of our communal consciousness, while at the same time always subverting, playing and beguiling with his beautiful verse' Afua Hirsch

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE BRITISH BOOK AWARDS ‘Beautiful, haunting, thought-provoking … A book I will return to again and again’ Bernardine Evaristo A gorgeously produced, hugely original examination of Black Britishness in the 21st century What is Black Britain? In 2021, award-winning poet Roger Robinson and acclaimed photographer Johny Pitts rented a red Mini Cooper and decided to follow the coast clockwise in search of an answer to this question. Leaving London, they followed the River Thames east towards Tilbury, where the Empire Windrush docked in 1948. Too often, that is where the history told about Black Britain begins and ends – but Robinson and Pitts continued out of London, following the coast clockwise through Margate to Land’s End, Bristol to Blackpool, Glasgow to John O’Groats and Scarborough to Southend on Sea. Here, the authors found not only Black British culture long overlooked in official narratives of Britain, but also the history of Empire and transatlantic slavery to which every Briton is tethered. Home Is Not a Place is the spectacular result of the journey they documented: a free-form composition of photography, poetry and essays that offers a book-length reflection upon Black Britishness – its complexity, strength and resilience – at the start of a new decade. ‘Masterful … A thing of brilliance’ Caleb Azumah Nelson, author of Open Water

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