Join us for an evening with Ishion Hutchinson, shortlisted for the T.S.Eliot Prize for Poetry.

Free & open to all. Places limited. Arrive early to avoid disappointment.

Most events take place on our first floor, which is accessible by stairs. If you have any concerns about access, please don't hesitate to contact us.

In language that is sensuous and biblical, School of Instructions centres on the experience of West Indian volunteer soldiers in British regiments during the First World War. The poem gathers the psychic and physical terrors of these Black soldiers in the Middle East war theatre and refracts their struggle against the colonial power they served. The narratives of the soldiers overlap with Godspeed, a young schoolboy living in rural Jamaica of the 1990s. This visionary collision, written in a form Ishion Hutchinson calls ‘contrapuntal versets’, unsettles time and event. It reshapes grand gestures of heroism into a music of supple, vigilant intensity. Elegiac and odic, epochal and lyrical, the triumph of School of Instructions is how it confronts the legacy of imperial silencing and etches shards of remembrances into a form of survival. School of Instructions was nominated for the T.S.Eliot Prize 2023.

Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of the poetry collections Far District, winner of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, and House of Lords and Commons, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature, the Whiting Award, and a Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prize, among other honours.