Roger Robinson is the critically acclaimed author of A Portable Paradise which won the T.S. Eliot Prize (2019), the and RSL Ondaatje Prize (2020), and was named a New Statesman Book of the Year. His collection Home Is Not a Place created in collaboration with Johny Pitts, won the Cholmondeley Award (2024), was a Guardian Poetry Book of the Year and shortlisted for the British Book Awards. He has also been a collaborator with the artist Hurvin Anderson on his monograph published by Rizzoli in 2022. He is a Royal Society of Literature Fellow and has been shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, the OCM Bocas Poetry Prize, the Oxford Brookes Poetry Prize, and the European Prize for Freedom.

About Some Sacred Harbour

‘His poems are deep, mature, moving and inventive’ BERNARDINE EVARISTO

‘Robinson is one of the most important poetic voices in the UK right now’ RAYMOND ANTROBUS

‘His work manages to be both convincingly rich and textured’ PAUL FARLEY

Some Sacred Harbour gathers a lifetime’s work by beloved, T. S. Eliot Prize and Ondaatje Prize-winning poet, performer and educator, Roger Robinson. This collection launches a conversation about Creative Citizenship, a philosophy that argues creativity belongs to everyone.

Drawing on more than thirty years of writing, teaching and community practice, the book introduces the principles of Creative Citizenship, the belief that creativity is not a talent possessed by a gifted few but a civic practice that helps societies remember, connect and imagine.

For Robinson, poetry has always been part of that wider ecology. His poems explore migration, family, music, memory, grief, ecology and the Black Atlantic, but they also ask a larger question: what is culture for? His answer is both simple and ambitious. Creativity is not something we consume. It is something we practise together.

That philosophy has shaped Robinson’s work far beyond the page. Over three decades he has created literary communities in schools, libraries, festivals, prisons and neighbourhood organisations, treating poetry as a way of building relationships. Some Sacred Harbour, is the culmination of a creative life rooted less in performance than participation, less in individual achievement than collective imagination.

The publication of Some Sacred Harbour arrives amid growing international conversations around loneliness, civic life, the decline of third places and the search for new forms of community. Robinson’s work offers a timely contribution to those discussions, proposing that creativity is an integral part of the social infrastructure that helps people live well together.