We're very happy to announce that Self-Portrait as Othello by Jason Allen-Paisant and The Ink Cloud Reader by Kit Fan have been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection!

Established in 1992, the Forward Prizes for Poetry are the most influential awards for new poetry in the UK and Ireland, honouring fresh voices alongside internationally established names. The judges on the panel for best collection are Bernadine Evaristo, Kate Fox, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Andrés Ordorica and Jessica Traynor.

The winners of the awards will be announced at a ceremony in the autumn. You can see the full shortlist here.

Congratulations to Jason and Kit!

The interlocking poems of Jason Allen-Paisant's second collection, Self-Portrait as Othello, imagine Othello in the urban landscapes of modern London, Paris and Venice and invent the kinds of narrative he might tell about his intersecting identities. Poetic memoir and ekphrastic experiment, Self-Portrait as Othello focuses on a character at once fictional and real. Othello here represents a structure of feeling that was emerging in seventeenth-century Venice, and is still with us.

Portraiting himself as Othello, Allen-Paisant refracts his European travels and considers the Black male body, its presence, transgressiveness and vulnerabilities. Othello's intertwined identities as 'immigrant' and 'Black', which often operate as mutually reinforcing vectors, speak to us in the landscape of twenty-first-century Europe.

In his disquieting third collection The Ink Cloud Reader, Kit Fan takes enormous risks linguistically, formally and visually to process the news of a sudden illness and the threat of mortality, set against the larger chaos of his beloved city Hong Kong and our broken planet. These shape-shifting poems are sensitive to anxiety and to beauty, questioning the turbulent climate of our time while celebrating the power of ink – of reading and writing.