Bio

Isabelle Baafi is London-born poet, writer and editor of Jamaican and South African heritage. Her work explores identity and morality within complex power structures. Her debut poetry book Chaotic Good (Faber & Faber / Wesleyan University Press, 2025) won the Jerwood Prize for Best First Collection 2025. Additionally, it was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2025 and the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize 2026, was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize 2026, and was named a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and a Guardian Book of the Year.

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