Kei Miller selects the UK’s 10 best emerging writers

The awardwinning poet and writer puts together an ‘unapologetically, triumphantly, diverse’ list of talents at the start of promising careers

The brief from National Centre for Writing and British Council was a straight-forward one: to select 10 of the most promising, most interesting new talents working in the UK right now. Emerging talents.

I got stuck on that word. Emerging. It was impossible not to ponder its particular resonance in this moment, after the year and a half we lived through – some of us, just barely. Covid-19 was a great wave of horribleness that washed over this country and the world. We haven’t fully emerged from it; many of us are still holding our breaths as if under water, looking up to an elusive surface that we can’t quite break. This is the question that kept niggling at me: what does it mean to emerge in 2021?

The International Literature Showcase is a partnership between National Centre for Writing and British Council, with the support of Arts Council England. You can book a free place to hear Kei Miller in conversation with some of his selected writers, on Thursday 24 June at 5pm.