Description
About Will Harris
Will Harris is a writer of mixed Anglo-Indonesian heritage, born and based in London. He has worked in schools, led workshops at the Southbank Centre and teaches for The Poetry School. He is an Assistant Editor at The Rialto and a fellow of The Complete Works III. Published in the Bloodaxe anthology Ten: Poets of the New Generation, he was featured in ES Magazine as part of the “new guard” of London poets. His poem ‘SAY’ was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem 2018, and he won a Poetry Fellowship from the Arts Foundation in 2019. His debut pamphlet of poems, All this is implied, published by HappenStance in 2017, was joint winner of the London Review Bookshop Pamphlet of the Year and shortlisted for the Callum Macdonald Memorial Award by the National Library of Scotland.
Mixed-Race Superman, an essay, was published by Peninsula Press in 2018 and in an expanded edition by Melville House in the US in 2019. His first full poetry collection, RENDANG, is forthcoming from Granta in the UK in February 2020 and from Wesleyan University Press in the US later in the year.
About RENDANG
A startlingly radical and progressive poetic journey, RENDANG takes the reader from West Sumatra to Planet Mongo via the Gray’s Inn Road, through Indonesian artefacts and issues of gentrification. RENDANG is an urgent comment on what it means to be a person now; a dissection of and love letter to the histories, places, and things that make us.
Through a ludic voice, an adept and complex language play, shifting perspectives, and a masterful command of form, Will Harris creates a poetry that dissects the ambivalences, difficulties, and voices of a contemporary landscape. A significant collection from one of the most exciting young writers in the UK.
