Mapping the Future: The Complete Works

Shortlisted for the poetry category of the Sky Arts Awards 2024

Foreword by Bernardine Evaristo

'Mapping the Future is a groundbreaking anthology of poetry and original essays offering fresh and daring literary perspectives from a new generation of outstanding British poets. It represents a landmark moment in the history of poetry.' – Bernardine Evaristo

In 2008 the level of poets of colour published by major presses was less than 1%. In 2020 it was over 20%. The Complete Works Poetry – an initiative spearheaded by Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo – played a significant role in this change. Supporting 30 poets from 2008 through to 2020, The Complete Works produced an unprecedented number of prizewinners, including the Forward Prizes (3), T.S. Eliot Prize (2), Ted Hughes Award (2), Somerset Maugham Award, Dylan Thomas Prize, Rathbones Folio Prize and Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. TCW Fellows have also gone on to judge every major poetry award, and to take on significant roles in academia and translation, publishing over 40 collections.

The Complete Works has become the most successful collective ever formed in British poetry. Mapping the Future offers new work by all 30 writers it has supported, including Warsan Shire, Raymond Antrobus, Mona Arshi, Roger Robinson, Inua Ellams, Malika Booker, Sarah Howe, Will Harris, Kayo Chingonyi, Jay Bernard, Yomi Sode and Karen McCarthy Woolf. It also includes fierce essays re-drawing the map of British poetry by 10 of the 30 poets, touching on the most significant topics of our time.

Mapping the Future is not just a magnificent anthology of some of the best UK poets, it is also an exploration on how poetry in Britain has become much more inclusive over the past 15 years: what has been won, and what is still being fought for. This anthology offers a timely insight into British poetry and how the voice of the ‘other’ continues to take centre-stage in pivotal times.

Mapping the Future is edited by poet Karen McCarthy Woolf, editor of the second two Ten anthologies in The Complete Works series, with Dr Nathalie Teitler, director of The Complete Works.

‘The 30 Black and Asian poets in this anthology, among Britain’s leading new generation of poets, were on a mentoring scheme I founded for poets of colour called Complete Works (2007–2017), when under 1% of poetry books in the UK were by poets of colour. By 2020, it was over 20%. It is testament to the power of inclusion initiatives to reinvigorate art forms with new voices and fresh perspectives.’ – Bernardine Evaristo, Service 95 (5 Modern Poets to Note), on Mapping the Future

‘Established by Bernardine Evaristo, The Complete Works is the most transformative poetry collective ever; in 2008 the number of poets of colour published by major presses was 1%, by 2020 it was 20%. This book represents this seismic shift, with new work by poets including Raymond Antrobus, Warsan Shire and Jay Bernard.’ – Chris McCabe, Librarian, National Poetry Library, in The Bookseller (Autumn 2023 Highlights) on Mapping the Future: The Complete Works Poets

'The year also saw three noteworthy anthologies ... Mapping the Future (Bloodaxe), edited by Nathalie Teitler and Karen McCarthy Woolf, brings together poems and essays from the 30 graduates of the Complete Works, the programme that did so much to bring recognition to British-based poets of colour such as Malika Booker and Roger Robinson.' – Rishi Dastidar, The Guardian (Best poetry books of 2023)

'There’s a breathtaking variety of poetics ... read this for excitement, inspiration, and also to map, as Eileen Pun puts it, “How thought becomes manifest, how the I / continually tries every variation of light”.' – Fiona Sampson, The Guardian (Poetry Books of the Month)

Born in London to English and Jamaican parents, Karen McCarthy Woolf is the author of two poetry collections and the editor of seven literary anthologies. Shortlisted for the Forward Felix Dennis and Jerwood Prizes, her debut An Aviary of Small Birds (Carcanet, 2014) tells the story of losing a son in childbirth and was an Observer Book of the Year. Her second, Seasonal Disturbances (Carcanet, 2017), explores gentrification, the city and the sacred, and was a winner in the inaugural Laurel Prize for ecological poetry. In 2019 she moved to Los Angeles as a Fulbright postdoctoral scholar and Writer in Residence at the Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA exploring the relationship between poetry, law and the impacts of capitalism on black, brown and indigenous bodies. She is a fellow of The Complete Works, a nationwide professional development programme committed to creating more cultural diversity in mainstream poetry publishing; was included in its associated anthology, Ten: New Poets from Spread the Word (2010); and went on to edit the subsequent Bloodaxe anthologies, Ten: The New Wave (2014) and Ten: Poets of the New Generation (2017), also co-editing Mapping the Future: The Complete Works Poets (2023) with Nathalie Teitler. After returning to the UK, 2021 took her to Brazil as an artist in residence at the Sacatar Institute in Bahia where she was researching new work that explores sugar and its cultural and material legacies.

Nathalie Teitler works across the fields of arts, activism and academia. Born in Buenos Aires, she holds a PhD in Latin American Poetry (King’s College London, 2000). She has run literature programmes promoting diversity in the UK for over 20 years, founding the first national mentoring and translation programmes for writers living in exile, and is the Director of The Complete Works. In 2015 she founded the world’s first poetry-dance company, Dancing Words, which produces live pieces and films which have been shown at festivals around the world. Nathalie is the co-founder of Invisible Presence, a national programme developing British Latino writers. She co-edited Un Nuevo Sol: British LatinX Writers (flipped eye, 2019), the first major anthology of UK-based writers of Latin American heritage, with Nii Ayikwei Parkes, and Mapping the Future: The Complete Works Poets (Bloodaxe Books, 2023) with Karen McCarthy Woolf. She was appointed Projects Manager for the Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowships in 2018, and has been a director of Bloodaxe Books since 2021.