These poems are shaped by the various places Malika Booker has come to know as home: Brooklyn, Brixton, Grenada, Trinidad and Guyana. One minute we’re in Grenada, the next at border control in Heathrow – all part of a larger story of diaspora and displacement.
Influenced by the likes of Toni Morrison, Jamaica Kincaid, Sharon Olds and Toi Derricotte, Booker weaves a visceral, emotive patchwork of the dramas inherent in both extraordinary world travel and ordinary domestic life.
Malika Booker is a British writer of Guyanese and Grenadian parentage. Her pamphlet Breadfruit was published by Flipped Eye in 2008, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her poems are widely published in magazines and anthologies, including Out of Bounds: Black & Asian Poets, edited by Jackie Kay, and Ten: New Poets from Spread the Word, edited by Bernardine Evaristo and Daljit Nagra. She has represented British writing internationally, both independently and with the British Council, in such countries as Slovenia, Switzerland, New Zealand, India and Azerbaijan. Malika was the first Poet in Residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company. She lives in south London.