Malika Booker
Malika Booker, currently based in Leeds, is a lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, a British poet of Guyanese and Grenadian Parentage, and co-founder of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen (A writer’s collective). Her pamphlet Breadfruit, (flippedeye, 2007) received a Poetry Society recommendation and her poetry collection Pepper Seed (Peepal Tree Press, 2013) was shortlisted for the OCM Bocas prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre 2014 prize for first full collection. She is published with the Poets Sharon Olds and Warsan Shire in The Penguin Modern Poet Series 3: Your Family: Your Body (2017). A Cave Canem Fellow, and inaugural Poet in Residence at The Royal Shakespeare Company, Malika was awarded the Cholmondeley Award (2019) for outstanding contribution to poetry and elected a Royal Society of Literature Fellow (2022). Her poem ‘The Little Miracles’, commissioned by and published in Magma 75 (autumn 2019) won The Forward Prize for Best Single Poem (2020).
Read more poems by Malika Booker on The Guardian and Poetry Foundation.
Watch ‘Destined to Grow Apart’ a spoken word adaptation of Mars commissioned by BBC Earth.
Forward Prize History:
- 2020 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, winner for ‘The Little Miracles’ (Magma Poetry)
- 2017 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, shortlisted for ‘Nine Nights’ (Poetry Review)