Roger Robinson's T.S. Eliot Prize-winning collection A Portable Paradise has been longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize. The £10,000 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize rewards fiction, non-fiction or poetry which evokes the spirit of a place.
In the book, Roger explores place as something you carry inside you, but London as a city is also woven throughout poems on Grenfell and the Black British experience. Roger explains he “wanted to provide a cohesive world in exploring different parts and aspects of place that I live, and that other British people of colour live in at particular times."
These are finely crafted poems that reveal Roger Robinson’s capacity to tell involving stories and capture the essence of a character in a few words, to move the emotions with the force of verbal expression, and engage our thoughts, as in the sequence of poems that reflect on just what paradise might be. A Portable Paradise is a feast to be carried by lovers of poetry wherever they go.
