About
About us
Poetry London’s artistic vision is based on the understanding that ‘the best poetry’ includes the broadest variety of styles and subjects, and that the very best of that poetry often acts as an unacknowledged catalyst for change. Our understanding of change is that it is argumentative and uninhibited and Poetry London will do all it can to encourage that kind of poetry and be a home to it. Poetry London is committed to supporting, empowering, and uplifting racially and ethnically marginalized writers. The magazine’s roots are punk and DIY, born as a listings magazine during the austerity years of the 1980s, it sought to provide an alternative to the mainstream establishment by featuring writers from backgrounds often ignored and sidelined. Honouring those origins, we will publish poems that shock and unsettle. These poems will speak of trauma, war and injustice, because that is the world we live in. We will prioritize work that deals with issues of migration, economic injustice and freedom of speech, introducing our audiences to poetry of the highest level that also addresses the most pressing issues of our times. Via our range of publishing-based activities – first and foremost our magazine, our annual poetry prize, our pamphlet competition, and our apprenticeship schemes, we will work to help our fellow artists undertake their first steps in their literary careers, creating a space for established writers to showcase their most experimental work, publishing them alongside emerging writers who have yet to publish their first collections.
Its eclectic international editorial vision makes Poetry London one of the very best, essential poetry magazines in English.
Supported by Arts Council England, Poetry London is unique among major UK poetry magazines in that it is independent of any owner, poetry organisation or publishing house. It is run by an editorial team headed by Niall Campbell. For information on Poetry London’s protection of data and GDPR see our Privacy Policy.
Poetry London spreads its net wide to include the latest from Europe, America and other parts of the world: work by new poets and established ones … It’s one of the best poetry magazines around.
Our team
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Niall Campbell
Poetry Editor
Niall Campbell is a poet from the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. His first poetry collection, Moontide, was published by Bloodaxe Books and won the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award and the Saltire First Book of the Year. Noctuary, his second collection, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. His latest collection, The Island in the Sound, will be published in September 2024.
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Isabelle Baafi
Reviews Editor
Isabelle Baafi is British poet and editor of Jamaican and South African descent. Her debut pamphlet, Ripe (ignitionpress), won a Somerset Maugham Award and was a PBS Pamphlet Choice. Her writing has been published in The Poetry Review, Magma, and elsewhere. She is a Ledbury Poetry Critic, an Obsidian Foundation Fellow, and an Editor at Magma. She is currently studying Creative Writing at the University of Oxford and writing her debut collection
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Aminata Sow
Managing Editor
Aminata is a Goldsmiths graduate from Turin, Italy. She recently completed her English and Drama BA and her main field of study is the relationship between fiction and fan cultures. She is an author for the Italian magazine Scomodo, and she published her short stories on various magazines.
Editorial Board
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Camille Ralphs
Contributing Editor
Camille Ralphs (b. 1992, Stoke-on-Trent) is a poet, critic and editor. Her poems and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in magazines including the New York Review of Books, the Poetry Review, The Spectator and the London Magazine, and she has released three pamphlets: Malkin (The Emma Press, 2015), which was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award; uplifts & chains (If A Leaf Falls/Glyph Press, 2020); and Daydream College for Bards (Guillemot Press, forthcoming 2023). She writes critically for publications including The Telegraph, The Poetry Review and the Los Angeles Review of Books, produces a regular column for Poetry London and conducts an interview series for Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal. She is Poetry Editor at the Times Literary Supplement. Her debut collection of poems, After You Were, I Am, will be published by Faber in 2024.
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Fred D’Aguiar
Contributing Editor
Fred D’Aguiar’s books include poetry, fiction, plays and a memoir. His most recent publications are a memoir, Year of Plagues (Carcanet, 2021) and a collection of poetry, titled For the Unnamed (Carcanet, 2023). His previous collection, Letters to America (Carcanet 2020) was a PBS Winter Choice. And a pamphlet, Arboretum for the Hunted (Arc, 2023).
Born in London of Guyanese parents, he grew up in Guyana and returned to the UK for his secondary and tertiary education. Currently, he is Professor of English at UCLA.
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Romalyn Ante
Contributing Editor
Romalyn Ante FRSL is a Filipino-British poet, essayist, and editor. She was born and bred in Batangas, Philippines and migrated to her second home, Wolverhampton, at sixteen. She is co-founding editor of harana poetry, a magazine for poets who write in English as a second or parallel language, and the founder of Tsaá with Roma, an online interview series with poets and other creatives. Her debut collection is Antiemetic for Homesickness (Chatto & Windus). She was awarded the Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship and was recently elected as a Royal Society of Literature Fellow.
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Declan Ryan
Contributing Editor
Declan Ryan’s first collection, Crisis Actor, was published by Faber & Faber in 2023. His reviews and essays have appeared in journals including New York Review of Books, The Baffler, Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, The Observer, Poetry, Los Angeles Review of Books and New Statesman.
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Meena Kandasamy
Contributing Editor
Described by the Independent as a ‘one-woman, agit-prop literary-political movement’, Meena Kandasamy is a poet, writer, translator, anti-caste activist and academic based in Chennai, India. Her extensive corpus includes two poetry collections, Touch (2006) and Ms Militancy (2010), as well as three novels, The Gypsy Goddess (2014), When I Hit You (2017) and Exquisite Cadavers (2019). In 2022, she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL) and was also awarded the PEN Hermann Kesten Prize for her writing and work as a ‘fearless fighter for democracy, human rights and the free word.’ Her latest published work is The Book of Desire, a translation of the love poetry of Thirukkural, and her own pamphlet of political poetry, Tomorrow Someone Will Arrest You.
Board of Trustees
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Ian Webster
Chair of the Board of Trustees
Ian Webster is currently a director of an international financial software company with responsibilities across strategy, program management and organizational development. Outside his professional life he was previously the chair of the Board of Trustees at the Poetry School.
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Rory Waterman
Trustee
Rory Waterman was born in Belfast in 1981, and grew up mainly in Lincolnshire. His full-length collections, all published by Carcanet, are: Tonight the Summer’s Over (2013), which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for a Seamus Heaney Award; Sarajevo Roses (2017), which was shortlisted for the Ledbury Forte Prize for Second Collections; Sweet Nothings (2020); and Come Here to This Gate (published April 2024). He is also a critic for the TLS, PN Review and other publications, and has written several books on modern and contemporary poetry. He co-edits New Walk Editions. Since 2012, he has worked at Nottingham Trent University, where he is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature and leads the MA in Creative Writing. He lives in Nottingham.
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Imtiaz Dharker
Trustee
Imtiaz Dharker is a poet, artist and video film-maker, awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2014. Her seven collections, all published by Bloodaxe Books, include Over the Moon and the latest, Shadow Reader. She has had eleven solo exhibitions of drawings and also scripts and directs video films, many of them for non-government organisations working in the area of shelter, education and health for women and children in India. She is Chancellor of Newcastle University.
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Momtaza Mehri
Trustee
Momtaza Mehri is a poet and researcher working across criticism, education, and radio. She is a former Young People’s Poet Laureate for London and Frontier-Antioch Fellow at Antioch University (Los Angeles). She has completed residencies at St. Paul’s Cathedral and the British Library, and is now the new Poet-in-Residence at Homerton College, University of Cambridge. She is a columnist for Tate Etc, the arts magazine published by the Tate network of galleries. Bad Diaspora Poems, her debut poetry collection, recently won the 2023 Forward Prize for Best First Collection.
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Jane Desmarais
Trustee
Jane Desmarais is Professor of English, Director of the Decadence Research Centre, and Head of the Department of English and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is Editor-in-Chief of Volupté, an online open-access interdisciplinary journal of Decadence studies and founder and Chair of the British Association of Decadence Studies. She has written numerous books and essays on late nineteenth poetry, art and music and has co-edited several works on the theme of decadence, including Arthur Symons: Selected Early Poems (with Chris Baldick, MHRA, 2017), Decadence and the Senses (with Alice Condé, Legenda, 2017), Decadence and Literature (with David Weir, Cambridge UP, 2019) and The Oxford Handbook of Decadence (with David Weir, Oxford UP, 2021). Her most recent publication is a co-edited volume (with Adam Alston) of Decadent Plays, 1890-1930 (Bloomsbury, 2024).
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Jack Castle
Trustee
Jack is a barrister practicing from Henderson Chambers in Temple, London. Before joining the Bar he took a master’s degree in Modernist literature, writing his thesis on Ezra Pound’s publication history in post-war Italy, then worked as an editor at an auction house and at a gallery specialising in Modern British art. He has written on art for a number of national publications.
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Isabel Galleymore
Trustee
Isabel Galleymore’s most recent collection is Baby Schema (Carcanet, 2024). She is an Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham, UK and a Fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study. Her poems have featured in the New York Review of Books, the TLS and Poetry. -
Tobe Ofili
Trustee
Tobe is a strategy consultant with experience across technology, business, finance, and accounting. He currently works with private corporations in different sectors, aiming to solve problems and create value. He has also supported charities in a personal capacity, and is especially committed to enabling local foodbanks achieve greater efficiency.
Tobe has a deep passion for the arts and poetry, and his technology-biased background serves as his driver for making the written art form relevant in an age of digital disruptions.
He writes poetry exploring themes of identity, belonging, and reconciling past and present conflicts buried within his Nigerian roots.
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Ali Lewis
Trustee
He received an Eric Gregory Award in 2018, and his poems, reviews, and short stories have appeared in magazines including The Times Literary Supplement, The New Statesman, The Telegraph, Poetry Review, and The London Magazine. He frequently collaborates with composers and settings of his work have been performed at Wigmore Hall and the Southbank Centre, and broadcast on Radio Three and Radio France Musique.He has worked as Editorial and Special Projects Manager for the Poetry School, and as Assistant and Associate Editor of Poetry London. More recently, he has worked for the Poetry Society, where he organised the 2024 Poetry Book Fair.He has an AHRC-funded PhD from Durham, an MA in Creative Writing from Goldsmiths, and a first-class degree in Politics from Cambridge, where he received the John Dunn and Precious Pearl Prizes. He is currently a lecturer at Exeter University.
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Poetry London
Goldsmiths, University of London
New Cross
London
SE14 6NW
UK
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Please send, with a return stamped addressed envelope, to
Poetry Editor
Poetry London
Goldsmiths, University of London
New Cross
London
SE14 6NW
UK
Submitting books for review
Please send to
Reviews Editor
Poetry London
Goldsmiths, University of London
New Cross
London
SE14 6NW
UK
By email
Poetry & Reviews Editors
Digital Manager
Aminata Sow
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Poetry London is a registered charity. We rely on a combination of statutory funding from Arts Council England, earned income, and donations from individuals to survive and continue our work.
Be a part of the next 100 issues
Poetry London needs our friends now more than ever. Help us continue our mission to publish a leading international poetry magazine and provide an artistic programme for nurturing a truly diverse community of poets, reviewers and editors. We published our 100th issue in Autumn 2021, celebrating 33 years of the magazine since its founding in 1988, and celebrated with a tour of the UK, which took in the Poetry Libraries in Manchester, Edinburgh and London – which has also resulted in the National Poetry Library at Southbank becoming our new home for events!
Although Poetry London has worked hard to increase its subscriptions, it’s been an ongoing challenge, exacerbated by the pandemic, to secure the funds we need to support all of our work. This is now beginning to bite. In order to continue to support our activities in this difficult time, we are asking all our friends to be generous once more. Can you help support Poetry London in its work? Any donation, of whatever size, is hugely appreciated, although we understand if you’re not able to donate at the moment. There are lots of other ways you can support us, for example by subscribing to the magazine, recommending the magazine to friends or institutions, or following us on social media.
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To reach out to a wide international readership of poetry, advertise your organisation or business in Poetry London. Poetry London is available in good literary bookshops across the UK and abroad, and is sent directly to our subscribers.
Our supporters
We are extremely grateful to the following organisations, whose support is so vital to the continuation and development of our work.
Arts Council England
Poetry London is an Arts Council National Portfolio Organisation. NPOs are leaders in their areas, with a collective responsibility to protect and develop our national arts and cultural ecology.
T. S. Eliot Foundation
Our new lecture series (in collaboration with the T. S. Eliot Foundation) will commission the world’s leading poets to give a reading of their poetry, as well as a talk on the general subject of poetry.
Fenton Arts Trust
Our New Poets Mentoring Scheme (currently funded by the Fenton Arts Trust) enables poets from a wide range of backgrounds, and of limited means, to work with a prominent mid-career mentor through constructive critique of their poems, advice on routes to publication, and confidence-building support.