Age 16-18
Highly-acclaimed poet Anthony Joseph inspired A Level English Literature students during a visit to New City College by reading poetry from his own award-winning book.
Anthony Joseph is a novelist and poet, as well as a musician and academic based in the creative writing department at King’s College London.
His book Sonnets for Albert – which the students are studying as their poetry coursework text – won the 2022 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry and the OCM BOCAS Prize for Caribbean Poetry and he spent the session at NCC’s Havering Sixth Form reading excerpts from the collection and giving advice to students on how to write poetry that has a real impact on people.
He said: “The more honest and personal you get in your work, the more you reveal yourself and your truth, the more people you reach. Your work will spread further and will affect people in a deeper way than if you just try to write a poem that is ‘impressive’.
“The things that you want to hide as a human being are the things that make the best literature. That’s why writing is so hard, because many people don’t want to expose themselves like that, but the people who do, they reach you.
“My writing is completely honest. I tell it as it is and there are no filters, especially when it comes to my father – who is the subject for Sonnets for Albert. He was an enigmatic and charismatic man but a terrible father to his many children.”
The Trinidad-born poet then answered questions from the students in an interesting and entertaining Q&A session.
English Literature teachers Julie Hyland and Megan Morrissey said it was a privilege to have Anthony Joseph visit in person and read his own work to the students.
They said his writing had inspired many of the students to choose the creative coursework option and use material from their own lives to produce poems in the style of Sonnets for Albert.
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