Isabelle Baafi

Isabelle Baafi is a London-born writer of Jamaican and South African heritage. Her poetry collection Chaotic Good (Faber & Faber/Wesleyan University Press, 2025) won the Jerwood Prize for Best First Collection. Additionally, it was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize, was longlisted for a Sky Arts Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize, and was a book of the year for the Guardian and the Irish Independent. Her pamphlet Ripe (Ignition Press, 2020) won a Somerset Maugham Award and was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice.

She has been commissioned by BBC Radio 4 and has performed her writing at venues around the world. Her work has been published in Granta, Callaloo, Wasafiri, the TLS, The Poetry Review, The London Magazine and elsewhere.

She edits at Poetry London, Magma and Ignition Press. As an editor, teacher and mentor, she aims to inspire confidence in emerging writers and help them find their voice. She has delivered writing workshops and courses to young children, teenagers and adults, at Oxford Brookes University, the Southbank Centre, the Arvon Foundation, the Poetry School, The Poetry Society, the Cúirt International Festival of Literature, the Verve Poetry Festival, Fusion Arts, the Winch, and numerous schools and colleges.