Meet the authors of our Summer Pamphlet Choice, Siblings published by Monitor Books.
Jay Bernard (FRSL) is an interdisciplinary writer and artist from London whose work is rooted in social history. Their first collection Surge was based on the archives surrounding the New Cross Fire in 1981. Recent work includes Blue Now, a live rendition of Derek Jarman’s film Blue, Complicity and a pamphlet about colonial memory in the urban environment. Jay is a DAAD literature fellow and a 2023/24 fellow at the Institute of Ideas and Imagination, Paris.
Mary Jean Chan is the author of Flèche (Faber, 2019), which won the Costa Book Award for Poetry and was shortlisted for multiple prizes, including the Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Poetry Prize. Their second collection Bright Fear was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and shortlisted for the 2023 Forward Prize for Best Collection. Chan is currently the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at the University of Cambridge and served as a judge for the Booker Prize.
Will Harris is the author of RENDANG (2020) and Brother Poem (2023), both published by Granta and Mixed-Race Superman (Peninsula). He was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. He co-translated Habib Tengour’s Consolatio (Poetry Translation Centre) with Delaina Haslam. He works in the care sector in Tower Hamlets, and helps facilitate the Southbank New Poets Collective with Vanessa Kisuule.
Nisha Ramayya grew up in Glasgow and now lives in London. Her poetry collection States of the Body Produced By Love (2019) is published by Ignota Books. Her second collection will be published by Granta in 2024. Tentatively called Now Let’s Take a Listening Walk, it hazards a musical journey through history, myth, and sci-fi.