Life Writing
Prize

Colin Grant is an author, historian, and Associate Fellow in the Centre for Caribbean Studies. His books include: Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey; and a group biography of the Wailers, I&I, The Natural Mystics. His memoir of growing up in a Caribbean family in 1970s Luton, Bageye at the Wheel, was shortlisted for the Pen/Ackerly Prize, 2013. Grant’s history of epilepsy, A Smell of Burning, was a Sunday Times Book of the Year 2016 

As a producer for the BBC, Grant wrote and directed a number of radio drama documentaries including African Man of Letters: The Life of Ignatius Sancho; A Fountain of Tears: The Murder of Federico Garcia Lorca; and Wheel and Come Again: a History of Jamaica’s Reggae.  

He is a regular tutor of creative writing for Arvon, Sierra Nevada College and City University, London.  

Grant also writes for a number of newspapers and journals including the Guardian, GQ, Telegraph, TLS, Prospect, New York Review of Books and Granta.  Grant’s next book, Homecoming: Voices of Caribbean Migration to Britain will be published by Jonathan Cape in 2019.

Born in Nigeria, Inua Ellams is a poet, playwright & performer, graphic artist & designer. He is a Complete Works poet alumni and a graphic designer at White Space Creative Agency. He facilitates workshops in creative writing where he explores reoccurring themes in his work – Identity, Displacement and Destiny – in accessible, enjoyable ways for participants of all ages and backgrounds.  

His creative work has been recognised with a number of awards: The Live Canon International Poetry Prize, The Arts Council of England Award, a Wellcome Trust Award, twice shortlisted for the Brunel Prize for African Poetry, longlisted the Alfred Fagan Award, Edinburgh Fringe First Award 2009 and the Liberty Human Rights Award. 

He has been commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company, National Theatre, Tate Modern, Louis Vuitton, Chris Ofili, BBC Radio & Television. His first three pamphlets of poetry Thirteen Fairy Negro Tales and Candy Coated Unicorn and Converse were published by Flipped Eye and The Wire-Headed Heathen by Akashic Books. Several plays including the critically acclaimed Black T-shirt Collection and award-winning The 14th Tale are published by Oberon. In 2005, he founded the Midnight Run— an arts-filled, night-time, playful, walking, urban movement that attempts to reconnect inner city lives with inner city spaces.

Ros Barber is a poet, novelist, and academic. Her critically-acclaimed verse novel The Marlowe Papers (2012), a fictional reimagining of the life of Christopher Marlowe, was winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize, joint winner of the Author’s Club Best First Novel Award and long-listed for the Women’s Fiction (formerly Orange, now Baileys) Prize. Her second novel Devotion (2015) was shortlisted for the Encore Award. Her collections of poetry include How Things Are on Thursday (2004) and Material (2008), a Poetry Book Society recommendation. Her PhD was on the relationship between fiction and biography. She is a lecturer in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London.