Inua Ellams & Roger Robinson

For our final event of 2026, we are delighted to present a spectacular double-header: Inua Ellams and Roger Robinson will be live in the shop discussing two landmark publications: a revised edition of Inua’s influential and beloved 2021 collection The Actual, and a career-spanning collection of Roger’s work, Some Sacred Harbour. These are two legendary figures in modern poetry and we are feeling incredibly lucky to have them both here in conversation. Join us for a very special night of chat and performance – we’re expecting tickets to disappear so don’t delay! Pre-order your copies of The Actual (rrp £12.99) and Some Sacred Harbour (rrp £12.99) for a special discounted price with your ticket, then collect on the night! About Inua Ellams Born in Nigeria, Inua Ellams, MBE, is a poet, playwright & performer, graphic artist & designer. Inua has written for the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre, and the BBC. His first play The 14th Tale was awarded a Fringe First at the Edinburgh International Theatre Festival. As well being an advisor for Lit In Colour, he is an ambassador for The Ministry of Stories, First Story, The London Library, patron of the Hastings Storytelling Festival, and fellow of The Royal Society of Arts and The Royal Society of Literature. He is also a board member of The Royal Society of Literature, The Poetry Translation Centre, Complicite Theatre and the Cheltenham Literature Festival. In 2023, he was awarded an MBE for Services To The Arts, and an Honorary Doctorate from University of the Arts, London. About The Actual A NEW EDITION OF THE 2021 RATHBONE FOLIO PRIZE-LONGLISTED COLLECTION ‘I was blown away by this book’ BERNARDINE EVARISTO ‘Bristles with energy… Consistently vivid’ GUARDIAN A symphony of personal and political fury dealing with empire and its legacies of racism, injustice and toxic masculinity. This revised edition of The Actual sees Inua unpack the socio-political and creative context behind the poems, in a series of essays that stand alone as genuinely informative and thought-provoking pieces in their own right, and which also offer new insights into the meaning and creative processes of the poems they accompany. At its heart, this book confronts the absolutism and ‘foolish machismo’ of hero culture from Perseus to Trump, from Batman to Boko Haram. Through the thick gauze of history, these breathtaking poems look the world square in the face and ask, ‘What the actual…?’ About Roger Robinson Roger Robinson is the critically acclaimed author of A Portable Paradise which won the T.S. Eliot Prize (2019), the and RSL Ondaatje Prize (2020), and was named a New Statesman Book of the Year. His collection Home Is Not a Place created in collaboration with Johny Pitts, won the Cholmondeley Award (2024), was a Guardian Poetry Book of the Year and shortlisted for the British Book Awards. He has also been a collaborator with the artist Hurvin Anderson on his monograph published by Rizzoli in 2022. He is a Royal Society of Literature Fellow and has been shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, the OCM Bocas Poetry Prize, the Oxford Brookes Poetry Prize, and the European Prize for Freedom. About Some Sacred Harbour ‘His poems are deep, mature, moving and inventive’ BERNARDINE EVARISTO ‘Robinson is one of the most important poetic voices in the UK right now’ RAYMOND ANTROBUS ‘His work manages to be both convincingly rich and textured’ PAUL FARLEY Some Sacred Harbour gathers a lifetime’s work by beloved, T. S. Eliot Prize and Ondaatje Prize-winning poet, performer and educator, Roger Robinson. This collection launches a conversation about Creative Citizenship, a philosophy that argues creativity belongs to everyone. Drawing on more than thirty years of writing, teaching and community practice, the book introduces the principles of Creative Citizenship, the belief that creativity is not a talent possessed by a gifted few but a civic practice that helps societies remember, connect and imagine. For Robinson, poetry has always been part of that wider ecology. His poems explore migration, family, music, memory, grief, ecology and the Black Atlantic, but they also ask a larger question: what is culture for? His answer is both simple and ambitious. Creativity is not something we consume. It is something we practise together. That philosophy has shaped Robinson’s work far beyond the page. Over three decades he has created literary communities in schools, libraries, festivals, prisons and neighbourhood organisations, treating poetry as a way of building relationships. Some Sacred Harbour, is the culmination of a creative life rooted less in performance than participation, less in individual achievement than collective imagination. The publication of Some Sacred Harbour arrives amid growing international conversations around loneliness, civic life, the decline of third places and the search for new forms of community. Robinson’s work offers a timely contribution to those discussions, proposing that creativity is an integral part of the social infrastructure that helps people live well together. For venue access info, click here.