“I wish I could wake up and find the electricity on all day long.
I wish I could hear the birds sing again, no shooting and no buzzing drones.
I wish my desk would call me to hold my pen and write again,
or at least plow through a novel, revisit a poem, or read a play.
All around me are nothing
but silent walls
and people sobbing
without sound.”
[Mosab Abu Toha]

In this poetry reading and talk, Raymond Antrobus shows materials and videos of works that inspired him, such as the works of artist Chrsitine Sun Kim and poet Mosab Abu Toha. He also discusses language and communication in the light of the experience of his deafness.

Raymond Antrobus is a poet, writer and broadcaster. He was born in London to an English mother and Jamaican father.
He’s a Cave Canem Graduate and a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature. He is the author of To Sweeten Bitter (UK, Out-Spoken Press), The Perseverance (UK, Penned In The Margins / US, Tin House) and All The Names Given (US, Tin House / UK, Picador) as well as children’s picture book Can Bears Ski? (UK, Walker Books / US, Candlewick). He is the 2019 recipient of the Ted Hughes Award as well as the Sunday Times/University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award, and became the first poet to be awarded the Rathbone Folio Prize. His first full-length collection, The Perseverance was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and The Forward Prize, ‘All The Names Given’ was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot prize and the Costa Award.
Inventions in sound, the radio documentary produced in 2021 with Eleanor McDowall (Falling Tree productions) for BBC Radio 4 was among the winners of the Third Coast/RHDF Competition.