Nick Makoha for The New Carthaginians

"This book, Nick Makoha has found an otherworldly, visionary voice and diction that arrest you from the first page and never let you go." ~ Jason Allen-Paisant, Winner of the TS Eliot Prize

Nick Makoha is a Ugandan poet and playwright whose debut collection, Kingdom of Gravity, was shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize and was one of the Guardian's Best Books of the Year. He is described as one of the UK's most daring and celebrated poets.

His poems have appeared in The New York Times, the Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, Wasafiri, Boston Review, and Callaloo. He is the founder of Obsidian Foundation, winner of the 2021 Ivan Juritz Prize and the Poetry London Prize.

He joins us for The New Carthaginians, an expansive new collection revealing a world in which time is out of joint...

A hijacked plane lands at Entebbe International Airport in 1976, triggering the crisis that will lead to Idi Amin's Uganda becoming a pariah state and, within a few years, to the young Nick Makoha's flight from the country. A mysterious writer daubs poetic slogans on the walls of late-'70s New York City, signing them SAMO (c). Three characters who are also one - the Poet, a Black Icarus and a resurrected Jean-Michel Basquiat - journey through a time that is both our own and not, watching TV, discussing art and literature and tucking their wings into their jackets on the way to airport security.

Concerned throughout with flight and falling, the sample and the loop, The New Carthaginians is a poetry collection of staggering originality: a work by an author at the height of his powers, in which the familiar Western canons of art, history and philosophy are prised apart and reassembled in a new configuration. Drawing on Basquiat's technique of the 'exploded' collage, our heroes' odyssey gathers the symbols of a new mythos, through which the othering of Black life might be undone and the stage set for some fresh emergence, some transfigured understanding of myth and life.

'Hold that note,' writes the poet. 'In this place you are no longer the chorus... In any future, remember you are a New Carthaginian.'

"A moving collection of entangled histories. Makoha's poems break, cut, scratch and sample with heightened language to remake and renew the boundaries of myth. Do not sleep on The New Carthaginians" ~ Raymond Antrobus