Malika Booker

• Name — Malika Booker • Honorific Suffix — FRSL • Born — 1970 • Birthplace — London, UK • Employer — Leeds University Manchester Metropolitan University • Education — Goldsmiths, University of London (BSc, MA) • Occupation — Poet and artist • Awards — Cholmondeley Award (2019) Forward Prize for Poetry (2020, 2023) • Website — http: malikabooker.com/

Malika Booker was born in London, UK, to Guyanese and Grenadian parents. She grew up in Georgetown, Guyana, and returned to the UK aged 13, with her parents. Booker began writing and performing poetry while studying a bachelors degree in anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. She graduated in 1992. She studied a master's degree in Creative Writing and Life Writing at her alma mater, graduating in 2003. She was mentored by Kwame Dawes, W. N. Herbert and Mimi Khalvati.

Booker founded the poetry collective Malika's Kitchen in 2001, which also included Nick Makoha. She took part in The Complete Works mentoring programme. Her first collection of poetry, Pepper Seed, was published by Peepal Tree Press in 2013 and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre prize for best first full collection published in the UK and Ireland. Booker was the inaugural Poet In Residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon. Booker's poem "Nine Nights", first published in The Poetry Review in autumn 2016, was shortlisted for Best Single Poem in the 2017 Forward Prize. In 2019, Booker served as Chair of Judges for the international Manchester Poetry Prize. Booker has written for radio and for the stage, and her work has appeared in journals and anthologies including Bittersweet: Contemporary Black Women’s Poetry (1998), The India International Journal (2005), Ten New Poets (2010), Out of Bounds, Black & Asian Poets (2012), and New Daughters of Africa (2019). Her Her first theatre show Absolution (1999) was commissioned by the Austrian Cultural Institute, Apples and Snakes and Battersea Arts Centre. Booker works as a Creative Writing lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University.

• 1998: Bittersweet: Contemporary Black Women's Poetry. Ed. Karen McCarthy (The Women's Press) • 2000: IC3: The Penguin Anthology of New Black Writing. Eds Courttia Newland and Kadija Sesay (Penguin) • 2004: KIN: Commemorative Tour Anthology (Renaissance One) • 2004: The Way We See It, The Way It Is (Lynk Reach) • 2007: Breadfruit (flipped eye publishing). • 2010: Ten New Poets (Bloodaxe) • 2012: Hidden Gems Volume Two: Contemporary Black British Plays. Ed. Deirdre Osborne (Oberon Books). • 2013: Pepper Seed (Peepal Tree Press), • 2017: Penguin Modern Poets 3: Your Family, Your Body by Malika Booker, Sharon Olds, Warsan Shire (Penguin). • 2019: New Daughters of Africa: An international anthology of writing by women of African descent. Ed. Margaret Busby (London:Myriad Editions).