Kei Miller is a Jamaican poet and novelist whose works have won the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and been nominated for the RSL Ondaatje Prize and the Costa Poetry Award. Born in Jamaica in 1978, Miller read English at the University of the West Indies before completing an MA at Manchester Metropolitan University. It was during his MA that Miller broached the UK slam poetry scene - in 2004 he became Manchester’s slam poetry champion. Speaking of the poetry world’s resistance to performance poetry, Miller described it as “a fight between the poet who does his best work standing up, who finds his greatest eloquence on stage, and the poet who does his best work sitting down, who finds his greatest eloquence on the page”. Moving from stage to page, his first poetry collection, Kingdom of Empty Bellies (2006), was hailed by Lorna Goodison as ‘a strong new presence in poetry’, and his fourth collection, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion (2014) - an imagined conversation between a rationalist cartographer and a questioning rastaman - won the prestigious Forward Prize for Best Collection. In 2014, Miller was named one of the 20 ‘Next Generation Poets’. His other published works include Augustown (2016), In Nearby Bushes (2019), Things I Have Withheld (2021). He is currently Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Exeter.