Nick Makoha is a poet, playwright and creative entrepreneur. Born in Uganda in 1974, Makoha was forced to flee the country with his mother to escape Uganda’s civil war and dictator Idi Amin’s tyranny. A childhood hobby of poetry was put aside for a degree in biochemistry and a job in finance, but Makoha eventually decided to return to the craft. Upon quitting his London banking job, Makoha set fire to his suits, and says 'I did this to remind myself that I did not want an easy way back. I wanted to give my all to the art of writing.' His first poetry pamphlet, The Lost Collection of an Invisible Man (2005), launched flipped eye’s pamphlet series, and was followed by The Second Republic (2014) and The Resurrection Man (2015), which won the Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize and Brunel African Poetry Prize. The Kingdom of Gravity (2017), his first full-length collection, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. In recent years, Makoha has coined the term ‘The Black Metic’ to describe the experience of black writers caught in an ambiguous state of hybridity in cultural space, e.g to be British and Ugandan, and the creative processes they use to navigate this. He has since founded The Obsidian Foundation, a creative community for black poets of African descent to develop their writing practice.
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