T.S. Eliot Prize Winner Roger Robinson Interviewed at The Guardian

The Guardian's Claire Armitstead interviews this year's T.S. Eliot Prize winner, Roger Robinson, about his background, his poetry, and his latest collection, A Portable Paradise. We'll take a look at their conversation where they discuss Robinson's beginnings as a poet in London:

He began to make his name on the London poetry scene in the 1990s, eking out a living by doing workshops in London schools. “It was a time when many schools were thinking about role modelling,” he says. “I was trying to convince kids – mostly young black boys who were not doing well at school – that poetry could touch their lives and reading could be useful to them.” He looks momentarily bashful behind his grizzled beard then adds, “I dress relatively decently now but I used to be a bit more urban swaggering.”

His belief in mentoring was rooted in his own experience. “I have had many mentors and one of them was [Booker prize-winner and poet] Bernardine Evaristo , who said: ‘You’ve got talent but you need to hone your craft.’” By his mid 20s he knew that he wanted to be an artist, and that if he was going to succeed he would have to live frugally. “My mentors taught me that if you control your economics you can control your output.”

Evaristo was working for the writers’ support agency Spread the Word and, crucially, offered him the chance to attend free workshops, which he snapped up. During one, he met the poet Kwame Dawes, who urged him to broaden his reading. “He introduced me to Chinese and Russian and European poets. At the time I was only reading what I liked. They weren’t all black poets – I was into Seamus Heaney – but I was reading for culture; he made me read for craft, and think about why things worked.”

Continue with their conversation, from the top, at The Guardian.