Caleb Femi was born in 1990 in Kano, Nigeria, raised by his grandmother before moving to London at age seven to join his parents on the North Peckham Estate in Peckham. This transition from northern Nigeria to one of South London's notable social housing estates became the gravitational center of his creative life. He later studied English at Queen Mary, University of London, and from 2014 to 2016 taught English at a secondary school in Tottenham, a period that kept him close to the young people whose voices and realities are present throughout his work. Femi's public profile as a poet grew rapidly. In 2015 he won the Roundhouse Poetry Slam, one of the UK's most visible platforms for spoken and performance poetry. The following year, in 2016, he was appointed the first Young People's Laureate for London, a role that signified both his standing in the spoken word community and his commitment to poetry as a civic, communal practice rather than a purely literary one. His debut collection, *Poor*, published on 30 July 2020, centers around the North Peckham Estate and the lives that emerged there — young Black men, friendship, grief, systemic neglect, and the unique textures of a place that mainstream culture tends to reduce to statistics. The book is distinguished by its integration of photography alongside the poems, making the visual and verbal inseparable. *Poor* won the Forward Prize's Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection in October 2021, confirming its standing as one of the most significant debut collections in recent British poetry. Femi also works as a film director and photographer, and has written and directed five short films: *And They Knew Light* (2017), *Wishbone* (2018), *Secret Life of Gs* (2019), *Survivor's Guilt* (2020), and *Giraffe* (2023). His practice across these forms remains consistent: he repeatedly explores Black British experiences in urban South London, focusing on the lives of young men, and examining how communities represent themselves versus how they are portrayed by others. In 2021 he was named in *Dazed* magazine's Dazed100 list of the next generation shaping youth culture, a recognition that positioned him at the intersection of poetry, visual culture, and social commentary.
The Poet Index · Entry 1368
Caleb Femi
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“Caleb Femi was born in 1990 in Kano, Nigeria, raised by his grandmother before moving to London at age seven to join his parents on the North Peckham Estate in Peckham.”
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Editorial intro
Caleb Femi made the North Peckham Estate the subject of his debut poetry collection *Poor*, which rejects documentary distance — the speaker is not observing the estate from the outside but engaging deeply within it, alongside photographs that Femi captured of the place and its people. He belongs to a generation of British poets who emerged through slam and laureateship before focusing on the page, which infuses his work with both oral urgency and thoughtful visual design. What surprises readers expecting raw performance or quiet lyricism is how effectively *Poor* captures both registers at once: lines that resonate audibly and visually, structured around a specific postcode yet addressing broader questions of belonging, loss, and what it costs to survive in a place the world has already dismissed.
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