Breaking news: Poet Raymond Antrobus is nominated for a Costa Book Award

Award-winning poet, educator and writer, Raymond Antrobus has been shortlisted for a Costa Book Award for his collection All the Names Given, it has just been announced tonight.

Raymond is a d/Deaf poet whose second collection is an exploration of language and miscommunication.

He is one of 20 authors announced as being nominated tonight across five categories and is one of two poets with a background in education who are nominated on the poetry shortlist.

After writing The Perseverance, Antrobus became the first-ever poet to be awarded the Rathbone Folio Prize for best work of literature in any genre.

Other accolades include the Ted Hughes Award, A Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award and the Guardian Poetry Book of The Year 2018, as well as being shortlisted for the Forward Prize.

In 2018, he was awarded The Geoffrey Dearmer Prize for his poem Sound Machine. His poem Jamaican British was added to the GCSE syllabus in 2019.

The judges said:

‘With a startling and innovative approach, All the Names Given stands apart from contemporary poetry in pushing the frontiers of spoken art, while also reimagining sound on the page.’