Jason Allen-Paisant is a scholar, award-winning poet, and writer. He was raised in Jamaica and wanted to be a writer from an early age, but he put poetry on hold for many years in favor of a career in academia. While pursuing graduate study at the University of Oxford, he began to publish poems. He holds a doctorate in medieval and modern languages from the University of Oxford and was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Leeds.
Allen-Paisant’s debut poetry collection, Thinking with Trees (Carcanet Press), won the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, was shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize, and was an Irish Times and White Review book of the year. Self-Portrait as Othello (Carcanet Press), his sophomore book of poems, won both of the UK’s two most prestigious poetry awards for 2023—the Forward Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize. His other books include the philosophical treatise Engagements with Aimé Césaire (Oxford University Press), the study of Caribbean theatre Théâtre dialectique postcolonial (Editions Classiques Garnier), and The Natural World, a collaboration with photographers David Hartt and John Edmonds and curator Nathaniel Stein. His latest publication, The Possibility of Tenderness: A Jamaican Memoir of Plants and Dreams (Hutchinson Heinemann), was published in March 2025.
Allen-Paisant’s work explores how Afro-diasporic artists and communities shape their futures through embodied philosophies, focusing on the intersections of poetry and philosophy. His poetry has been published in Granta, The Guardian, and The Poetry Review, among other outlets. He has also appeared on BBC Radio 3 and 4. He has guest-edited various scholarly journal issues, and his work has been widely anthologized. His recent art collaborators include British painter Chris Ofili, the Manchester Art Gallery, and the Cincinnati Art Gallery.
Allen-Paisant is an associate professor of critical theory and creative writing at the University of Manchester and an associate editor of Callaloo Literary Journal. He lives in Leeds with his partner and two children.
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More Allen-Paisant
Video: Allen-Paisant reads his poem "On the Ponte di Rialto I watch myself glide"
Audio: Allen-Paisant appears on BBC Radio 4's The Verb
Text: Allen-Paisant is interviewed by The Guardian on his book The Possibility of Tenderness