Raymond Antrobus is an award-winning poet and educator. He was born in 1986 in Hackney, London, to an English mother and Jamaican father. Deaf at birth, he remained undiagnosed until the age of seven - until then it was thought the young Antrobus had learning difficulties - a fact which profoundly shaped his relationship with language. As a child, both Antrobus’ parents shared their love of poetry with him, reading him poems by William Blake, Linton Kwesi Johnson and others. His personal experiences as a deaf poet and his mixed-heritage identity are explored in his first full-length collection, The Perseverance (2018), which went on to win the Ted Hughes Award, the Rathbones Folio Prize and also a Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. Antrobus is also an experienced educator, working at both hearing and d/Deaf schools, and calls himself an ‘investigator of missing sounds’. In 2019 and 2021, his poems ‘Jamaican British’, ‘The Perseverance’, and ‘Happy Birthday Moon’ were added to the UK’s GCSE syllabus. His other works include Shapes & Disfigurements (2012), To Sweeten Bitter (2016), All the Names Given (2021), and the children’s book Can Bears Ski? (2021). He is an alumnus of The Complete Works, Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship, and Cave Canem, and one of the world’s first recipients of the MA in Spoken Word from Goldsmiths University.
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