We’re thrilled to announce that Self-Portrait as Othello by Jason Allen-Paisant has been shortlisted for The Writers' Prize!

Self-Portrait as Othello - which won the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2023 - is one of three collections shortlisted in the poetry category. The Writers' Prize, which was previously known as the Rathbones Folio Prize, awards literary excellence in fiction, non-fiction and poetry.

The Writers' Prize is notable for its unique selection and judging process, where books are nominated and judged exclusively by its own internal 'Academy', a body of over 350 writers and critics. The winners will be announced on Wednesday 13th March 2024. The author of the Book of the Year will receive £30,000, and each category winner is awarded £2,000.

Congratulations Jason!

The interlocking poems of Jason Allen-Paisant's second collection, Self-Portrait as Othello, imagine Othello in the urban landscapes of modern London, Paris and Venice and invent the kinds of narrative he might tell about his intersecting identities. Poetic memoir and ekphrastic experiment, Self-Portrait as Othello focuses on a character at once fictional and real. Othello here represents a structure of feeling that was emerging in seventeenth-century Venice, and is still with us.

Portraiting himself as Othello, Allen-Paisant refracts his European travels and considers the Black male body, its presence, transgressiveness and vulnerabilities. Othello's intertwined identities as 'immigrant' and 'Black', which often operate as mutually reinforcing vectors, speak to us in the landscape of twenty-first-century Europe.