Bio

Isabelle Baafi is poet, writer and editor of Jamaican and South African heritage, born and raised in London. Her collection Chaotic Good (Faber & Faber / Wesleyan University Press, 2025) won the Jerwood Prize for Best First Collection 2025. It was also shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2025, longlisted for the Swansea University International Dylan Thomas Prize 2026, and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Summer 2025.

Her pamphlet Ripe (ignitionpress, 2020) won a Somerset Maugham Award and was the Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice for Spring 2021.

She won First Prize in the Winchester Poetry Prize 2023, Second Prize in the London Magazine Poetry Prize 2022, and the Vincent Cooper Literary Prize 2019. She was shortlisted for the Oxford Poetry Prize 2022, the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award 2022, the Brunel International African Poetry Prize 2021, the Bridport Prize for Poetry 2020, and the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition 2019. She was also Highly Commended in the Manchester Poetry Prize 2023, Commended in the Verve Poetry Festival Competition 2020, and nominated for Best of the Net in 2020.

Her writing has been published in the TLS, Granta, The Poetry Review, Callaloo, The London Magazine, Oxford Poetry and elsewhere, and has been anthologised by Broken Sleep Books, Verve Poetry Press, 20.35 Africa and Brittle Paper.

She is the Reviews Editor of Poetry London and has edited issues of Magma (83: Solitude and 93: Liberation), Poetry Wales, Skin Deep and Tentacular. She is also a Ledbury Poetry Critic, an Obsidian Foundation Fellow and a board member at Magma.

She has been commissioned by BBC Radio 3 and Verve Poetry Press. She was a member of the Creative Access & Penguin Random House Mentoring Programme (2021-22), the Griot’s Well Programme with Writerz and Scribez (2020), and the London Library’s Emerging Writer’s Programme (2019-20).

She has performed at the BVI Lit Fest, the London Literature Festival, the BBC Contains Strong Language Festival, the Ledbury Poetry Festival, the Verve Poetry Festival, Push the Boat Out Festival, the Launceston Poetry Festival, the Bradford Literature Festival, the Winchester Poetry Festival, the Poetry in Aldeburgh Festival, the Battersea Arts Centre’s Homegrown Festival and the London Library Lit Fest.

She has a First degree in Comparative Literature and Film from the University of Kent, and an MSt with Distinction in Creative Writing from the University of Oxford, where she was a Kellogg Scholar.

She lives in London and is currently writing a novel.