Join Bloodaxe Books for the launch of Mapping the Future: The Complete Works Poets with anthology editors Nathalie Teitler and Karen McCarthy Woolf, plus special guest poets.
Both editors will be discussing the anthology with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley, and will be joined by special guests including Denise Saul, Leo Boix, Nick Makoha, Edward Doegar and Will Harris, who will be reading a selection of their poems from Mapping the Future. A special video of other pre-recorded readings from the anthology will also be shown as part of the launch event.
To receive reminder emails for the event, please register via TicketTailor: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/bloodaxebooks/1026258. If you register to attend on TicketTailor you will receive an event link reminder by email by midday the day before the event. For those who can’t make it live, the reading will be available on YouTube afterwards on this page.
If you miss the registration deadline, you can still watch live via the Bloodaxe YouTube channel.
To order copies of the anthology direct from Bloodaxe, please click on the links below (available via the Bloodaxe website from early October). If you are in Ireland or elsewhere in the EU, you can pre-order via Books Upstairs in Dublin:
UK: https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/mapping-the-future-1331
Ireland & EU: https://booksupstairs.ie/product/mapping-the-future-the-complete-works/
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Mapping the Future: The Complete Works Poets
Mapping the Future: The Complete Works Poets is a new anthology bringing together work by all 30 Fellows of the Complete Works poetry mentoring scheme supporting British poets from diverse backgrounds. The anthology is edited by Nathalie Teitler, Director of The Complete Works, and Karen McCarthy Woolf, a Fellow of the programme who went on to edit the second two TEN anthologies featuring work by The Complete Works poets.
In her introduction to Mapping the Future, Nathalie Teitler recounts the history of The Complete Works, which supported 30 poets from 2008 through to 2020, and which has become the most successful collective ever formed in British poetry. In her Foreword to the anthology, Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo explains why she was prompted to set up The Complete Works programme. A report she initiated found that in 2008 the level of poets of colour published by major presses was less than 1%. By 2020 it was over 20%.
The Complete Works Poetry played a significant role in this transformation of the British poetry scene, producing three Forward Prize winners, two T.S. Eliot Prize and Ted Hughes Award winners, along with single prize wins for the Somerset Maugham Award, Dylan Thomas Prize, Rathbones Folio Prize and Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. TCW Fellows have gone on to judge every major poetry award, publishing over 40 collections between them.
Mapping the Future presents new or recent work by Complete Works Fellows including Raymond Antrobus, Mona Arshi, Jay Bernard, Malika Booker, Kayo Chingonyi, Inua Ellams, Will Harris, Sarah Howe, Roger Robinson, Warsan Shire, Yomi Ṣode and Karen McCarthy Woolf. It also includes ten engaging essays re-drawing the map of British poetry, touching on some of the most significant topics of our time.
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Karen McCarthy Woolf was born in London to English and Jamaican parents. She is a Fellow of The Complete Works, and was included in its first anthology, Ten: New Poets from Spread the Word (2010), edited by Bernardine Evaristo & Daljit Nagra. McCarthy Woolf edited the subsequent anthologies, Ten: The New Wave (2014) and Ten: Poets of the New Generation (2017), also co-editing Mapping the Future: The Complete Works (2023) with Nathalie Teitler, all from Bloodaxe Books. Her first collection, An Aviary of Small Birds (Carcanet, 2014), was shortlisted for both the Forward and Aldeburgh Best First Collection Prizes. Her second, Seasonal Disturbances (Carcanet, 2017), was a winner in the inaugural Laurel Prize for ecological poetry. She was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022.
Dr Nathalie Teitler was born in Buenos Aires and holds a PhD in Latin American Poetry (King’s College London, 2000). She has run literature programmes promoting diversity in the UK for over 20 years and is Director of The Complete Works. She co-edited Un Nuevo Sol: British LatinX Writers (flipped eye, 2019) with Nii Ayikwei Parkes, and Mapping the Future: The Complete Works (2023) with Karen McCarthy Woolf. She was elected as an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018, and was appointed Projects Manager for the Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowships in 2018.
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