Mapping the Future: The Complete Works
Mapping the Future offers new work by all 30 writers supported by The Complete Works project, including Warsan Shire, Raymond Antrobus, Mona Arshi, Roger Robinson, Inua Ellams, Malika Booker, Sarah Howe, Will Harris, Kayo Chingonyi, Jay Bernard, Yomi Sode and Karen McCarthy Woolf.
In 2008 the level of poets of color published by major presses in the UK was less than 1%. By 2020 it was over 20%. The Complete Works Poetry - an initiative spearheaded by Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo - played a significant role in this change. Supporting 30 poets over a twelve-year period, The Complete Works produced an unprecedented number of prizewinners, including the Forward Prizes, T.S. Eliot Prize, Ted Hughes Award, Somerset Maugham Award, Dylan Thomas Prize, Rathbones Folio Prize and Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. TCW Fellows have also gone on to judge every major poetry award, and to take on significant roles in academia and translation, publishing over 40 collections. The Complete Works has become the most successful collective ever formed in British poetry.
Mapping the Future is not just a magnificent anthology of some of the best UK poets, it is also an exploration on how poetry in Britain has become much more inclusive over the past 15 years: what has been won, and what is still being fought for. As well as poetry, the anthology also includes fierce essays re-drawing the map of British poetry by 10 of the 30 poets, touching on the most significant topics of our time.This anthology offers a timely insight into British poetry and how the voice of the 'other' continues to take centre-stage in pivotal times.
Mapping the Future is edited by poet Karen McCarthy Woolf, editor of the second two Ten anthologies in The Complete Works series, with Dr Nathalie Teitler, director of The Complete Works, with a foreword by Bernardine Evaristo.
Shortlisted for the poetry category of the Sky Arts Awards 2024
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Become an affiliateNathalie Teitler works across the fields of arts, activism and academia. Born in Buenos Aires, she holds a PhD in Latin American Poetry (King's College London, 2000). She has run literature programmes promoting diversity in the UK for over 20 years, founding the first national mentoring and translation programmes for writers living in exile, and is the Director of The Complete Works. In 2015 she founded the world's first poetry-dance company, Dancing Words, which produces live pieces and films which have been shown at festivals around the world. She was appointed Projects Manager for the Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowships in 2018, and has been a director of Bloodaxe Books since 2021.
'Established by Bernardine Evaristo, The Complete Works is the most transformative poetry collective ever; in 2008 the number of poets of colour published by major presses was 1%, by 2020 it was 20%. This book represents this seismic shift, with new work by poets including Raymond Antrobus, Warsan Shire and Jay Bernard.' - Chris McCabe, Librarian, National Poetry Library, in The Bookseller (Autumn 2023 Highlights)
'The year also saw three noteworthy anthologies ... Mapping the Future (Bloodaxe), edited by Nathalie Teitler and Karen McCarthy Woolf, brings together poems and essays from the 30 graduates of the Complete Works, the programme that did so much to bring recognition to British-based poets of colour such as Malika Booker and Roger Robinson.' - Rishi Dastidar, The Guardian (Best poetry books of 2023)
'This generous anthology marks 15 years of the transformative project founded by Bernardine Evaristo and directed by Nathalie Teitler, which has been rocket fuel for work by British poets of majority global heritage ... The 30 Complete Works fellows comprise a roster of some of the most influential voices in the UK today... This volume demonstrates again how visionary that programme of mentorship and real-world opportunities was. There's a breathtaking variety of poetics ... read this for excitement, inspiration, and also to map, as Eileen Pun puts it, "How thought becomes manifest, how the I / continually tries every variation of light".' - Fiona Sampson, The Guardian (Poetry Books of the Month)
'A landmark text in British poetry, Mapping the Future reunites the thirty fellows of The Complete Works - a who's who of contemporary British poetry - with selections of new poetic and critical writing. Where the original [TEN] anthologies foregrounded novelty, here are those same artists in full artistic maturity, with conviction and force behind their ambitions, curiosities, solidarities and visions.' - Oluwaseun S. Olayiwola, Poetry Book Society Winter Bulletin 2023