Poet Jason Allen-Paisant: ‘We belong in the picture’

By Kadish Morris, The Guardian

The Jamaican-born author on exploring nature and black identity in his nonfiction debut, his chaotic writing habits, and how the TS Eliot prize changed his life

Jason Allen-Paisant, born in Jamaica in 1980, is a poet, writer and academic. Currently a professor of critical theory and creative writing at Manchester University, he released his debut poetry collection, Thinking With Trees, in 2021. His second collection, Self-Portrait as Othello, (2023) won the TS Eliot and the Forward prize. Through time spent in the north of England and Jamaica’s rural Coffee Grove district, his debut in nonfiction, The Possibility of Tenderness (Penguin), intimately explores ideas around class, leisure, economics and self-discovery, looking closely at the life of his farmer grandmother, as well as the plants and people that shaped who he is today. Allen-Paisant lives in Leeds with his wife and two children.

The Possibility of Tenderness is a departure from your work in poetry. How did you go about writing it?
I started with a mix of poetry and prose. Then I thought to write a series of essays [and] hammer out some of these big questions around leisure and class within nature but I remember thinking: “All of the ideas that I’m talking about in a theoretical way, I can bring them all out if I just tell a story.” My grandma, “Mama”, she’s the protagonist outside myself. I can use the story of her life to talk about planting, food independence, food sovereignty, living with plants, plants as medicine, globalisation and its effects and kinship with the land.

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