Anthony Anaxagorou | Granta

Anthony Anaxagorou

Anthony Anaxagorou is a British-born Cypriot poet, fiction writer, essayist, publisher and poetry educator. His poetry has been published in POETRY, The Poetry Review, Poetry London, New Statesman, Granta, and elsewhere. His work has also appeared on BBC Newsnight, BBC Radio 4, ITV, Vice UK, Channel 4 and Sky Arts. His second collection After the Formalities published with Penned in the Margins is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the 2019 T.S Eliot Prize. It was also a Telegraph and Guardian poetry book of the year. In 2020 he published How To Write It with Merky Books; a practical guide fused with tips and memoir looking at the politics of writing as well as the craft of poetry and fiction along with the wider publishing industry. He was awarded the 2019 H-100 Award for writing and publishing, and the 2015 Groucho Maverick Award for his poetry and fiction. In 2019 he was made an honorary fellow of the University of Roehampton. Anthony is artistic director of Out-Spoken, a monthly poetry and music night held at London’s Southbank Centre, and publisher of Out-Spoken Press.

Publications

Heritage Aesthetics

Anthony Anaxagorou

Witty and wide-ranging, Heritage Aesthetics draws from Anthony’s family’s migratory histories – between Cyprus and the UK – to interrogate patriarchy, xenophobia and national divides. Spanning from the British Empire to the contemporary moment, Anaxagorou unpacks the travelogues of colonial writers and military men alongside experiences of racism in the present.

Yet this collection never settles into being ‘about’ identity or contemporary culture. Anthony’s adept, eviscerating eye continues to complicate – looking at how perception is shaped, how we perform our politics, and how we love what is hard to love. Offering no easy answers, Anaxagorou instead calls for a deeper interrogation of the ways in which we’re living and performing.

Fearless, intensely honest and hopeful, Heritage Aesthetics merges Anthony’s gift for performance and his brilliant experimentation with form to create a vivid insistence to communicate a self in the world.