Anthony V. Capildeo FRSL is a Trinidadian Scottish writer of poetry and non-fiction. Currently Professor and Writer in Residence at the University of York, their site-specific word and visual art includes responses to Cornwall’s former capital, Launceston, as the Causley Trust Poet in Residence (2022) and to the Ubatuba granite of the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds (2023), as well as to Scottish, Irish, and Caribbean built and natural environments. Their numerous books and pamphlets, from No Traveller Returns (Salt, 2003), Person Animal Figure (Landfill, 2005) onwards, are distinguished by deliberate engagement with independent and small presses. Their work has been recognized with the Cholmondeley Award (Society of Authors), the Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection, the OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry, the Windham-Campbell Prize, and the Saltire National Poetry Award. Their publications include Like a Tree, Walking (Carcanet, 2021) (Poetry Book Society Choice), and A Happiness (Intergraphia, 2022). Their interests include silence, translation theory, medieval reworkings, plurilingualism, collaborative work, and traditional masquerade. Recent commissions include research-based Windrush poems for Poet in the City and for the Royal Society of Literature. Capildeo served as a judge for the Jhalak Prize (2023). Their non-fiction début, Masqueraders: Selected Essays, will be published in July 2026.
Description
As anyone who loves Anthony V. Capildeo’s poetry will know, they are a genius of syntax. Capildeo’s sentences hold and extend; they are taut, elaborate, world-building, reaching out to the other – to the limits of otherness in experience and language – before springing back to expose something intimately known or wholly surprising; they are ‘springy with the possibilities of encounter’. In these essays, letters, reports, echoes, fables, explorations of faith, Capildeo moves beyond the grasp of political and ecological violence, even as they bear witness to its various forms. These are missives big and small, clear and sticky. ‘The memory of having read a book,’ writes Capildeo (paraphrasing the woman who ran the bead shop near Helmsley), ‘is like kissing with synæsthesia.’ That, too, is the experience of reading this book: senses are mingled, solitudes joined, and certainties confounded.
Will Harris
These are literary dispatches from a brilliant mind. Early in Masqueraders, Capildeo writes, "This report comes to you from a little blue room of birds,” perfectly and beautifully describing the territories of place, solidarities, and ineffability that these sparklingly wrought sentences inhabit. With breathtaking erudition, stunning observations of the worlds of the world we live in, each paragraph is a new turn on the materiality of language or what Capildeo calls "the shared technology of the imagination.” In the end, "You don’t even know what breathing is."
Dionne Brand