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.

Steve Berg, Editor
American Poetry Review

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.

Ciaran Carson

Our team

  • 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.

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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.

  • 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 TLSPN 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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).

  • 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.

  • 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.

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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.

Next deadline

The advertising deadlines for our Spring 2024 and Summer 2024 issues are December 1 and March 1.

If you are interested in reaching our audience, please consult our rates and specifications and contact us on admin@poetrylondon.co.uk to make an enquiry. Please also contact us for any further information you require on our circulation.

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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.

Visit the Arts Council website

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.

Visit the T. S. Eliot Foundation website

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.

More about the Fenton Arts Trust

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