Jason Allen-Paisant

Jason Allen-Paisant (born 1980) is a Jamaican poet, writer and academic. His second collection of poems, Self-Portrait as Othello, won the 2023 T. S. Eliot Prize and the 2023 Forward Prize for Best Collection.

Early years and education
Allen-Paisant grew up in a small village in Manchester Parish, central Jamaica. His mother was a primary school teacher. He attended the University of the West Indies (Mona), followed by further study at the École normale supérieure (Paris), and the University of Oxford, where he earned a DPhil (Doctor of Philosophy) in Medieval & Modern Languages.

Writing
His dissertation was on theatre from the French- and English-speaking Caribbean and a monograph on Derek Walcott, Aimé Césaire and Bertolt Brecht, Théâtre dialectique postcolonial (Classiques Garnier), was published in 2017. A second monograph, Engagements with Aimé Césaire: Thinking with Spirits, will be published in February 2024 with Oxford University Press.

Allen-Paisant's first collection of poems, Thinking with Trees, won the poetry category of the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. His second collection, Self-Portrait as Othello, uses William Shakespeare's Othello to explore a black male immigrant's search for an identity and masculine role mode. It was a Poetry Book Society Choice in 2023 and went on to win the 2023 Forward Prize for Best Collection and the 2023 T. S. Eliot Prize. According to the Eliot Prize judging panel (which comprised Paul Muldoon, Sasha Dugdale and Denise Saul), Allen-Paisant's collection is "a book with large ambitions that are met with great imaginative capacity, freshness and technical flair."

A work of creative non-fiction by Allen-Paisant, entitled The Possibility of Tenderness: A Jamaican's Search for Freedom in Nature, is due to be published in 2025.

Academic career
Allen-Paisant is currently Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Critical Theory and Creative Writing in the Department of English, American Studies, and Creative Writing at the University of Manchester.