Raymond Antrobus was born in 1986 at Homerton Hospital in Hackney, East London, to an English mother and a Jamaican father who immigrated to England in the 1960s for work. As a child, he was thought to have learning difficulties; his deafness was diagnosed at six. This delay significantly influenced his relationship with language and communication, permeating his work as a lived issue rather than a literary notion. At home, poetry adorned the walls: his mother displayed William Blake's "London," and his father showcased Evan Jones's "The Song of the Banana Man." Antrobus’s father, born in rural Jamaica as one of seven brothers, lived with an aunt in Kingston before coming to England, and Antrobus felt his father’s deep voice as vibrations while lying on his chest during bedtime reading. This sensory memory of language as physical contact became a driving force in his poetry.
Antrobus began performing poetry in 2007 and found his first community in the London slam and open-mic scene. His first poetry mentor was Malika Booker when he was around twenty-one. He became one of the first recipients of an MA in Spoken Word Education from Goldsmiths, University of London, and helped establish Chill Pill at The Albany in Deptford and the Keats House Poets Forum between 2010 and 2018, co-curating work by Kae Tempest, Warsan Shire, Inua Ellams, and others. He has received fellowships from Cave Canem, The Complete Works 3, and Jerwood Compton and was shortlisted for Young Poet Laureate of London in 2015.
“His publishing journey began with the pamphlet *Shapes & Disfigurements of Raymond Antrobus* (Burning Eye Books, 2012), followed by *To Sweeten Bitter* (Outspoken Press, 2017), focused on the father-son relationship, featuring a foreword by Margaret Busby.”
That year, his poem "Sound Machine," first published in *The Poetry Review*, won the Geoffrey Dearmer Award, judged by Ocean Vuong. His debut full collection, *The Perseverance* (Penned in the Margins, 2018), explored themes of deafness, the death of his father, his mother's dementia, and his Jamaican-British heritage. Critics hailed the collection as colloquial, historical, and formally varied. It won the Ted Hughes Award in March 2019, judged by Linton Kwesi Johnson and others, and the Rathbones Folio Prize in May 2019, marking the first time that prize went to a poet. It was also shortlisted for the Griffin Prize, the Jhalak Prize, and the Somerset Maugham Award, named Poetry Book of the Year by both *The Guardian* and *The Sunday Times*, and later won the Sunday Times/University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award.
Subsequent work broadened his reach across forms. *All the Names Given* was published by Picador in 2021, followed by *Signs, Music* in 2024. His picture book *Can Bears Ski?* (Walker Books, 2020), illustrated by Polly Dunbar, answered the lack of children's titles featuring a deaf protagonist; in April 2022, deaf actress Rose Ayling-Ellis signed a BSL version on CBeebies, the first story entirely in British Sign Language on the channel. His memoir *The Quiet Ear: An Investigation of Missing Sound* (Hogarth Press, 2025) garnered significant critical acclaim, with *The New York Times* calling it "an insightful, bighearted memoir" and a "nuanced discussion of the ways that race and deafness intersect." Antrobus became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2020, was appointed MBE in 2021, and named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2026. Two of his poems were included in the UK's OCR GCSE syllabus in 2022.