Malika Booker

Malika Booker 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, Booker was awarded the Cholmondeley Award (2019) for outstanding contribution to poetry and elected a Royal Society of Literature Fellow (2022). She is the first woman to win the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem twice: The Little Miracles (2020) and Libation (2023).