Miguel Cullen

Miguel Cullen is a British poet and journalist who lives in London.

Background
Cullen was born into a mixed Argentinean-British household in World’s End, Chelsea in London in 1982. After boarding school, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. At Bristol University, he performed as to Jungle emcee on student radio, and become friends with Reprazent emcee MC Tali, as well as future Sunday Assembly leader Sanderson Jones. Other friends include Argentine painter Lobo Velar and writer Camilla Grudova.

Poetry
Cullen's poetry has been described as 'stoner poetry', in an in-depth interview in Writers Mosaic “unlike any poetry I’ve ever encountered. It ranges across various cultures, especially popular culture and dwells somewhere between the expressionistic and surreal, subversive, and possessed of unparalleled energy” by August Kleinzahler. Ian Thomson (writer) described it having “allusions from Greek mythology (colliding) with sound system culture (and) pavement pounding street demotic", while Vice (magazine) described it as “full of the lawless energy of late nights and early mornings, hop-scotching London’s jungle raves”. His debut collection, Wave Caps   was a The Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year in 2014. AN Wilson blurbed his second, Paranoid Narcissism! which was an Evening Standard Book of the Year 2017, about which SJ Fowler wrote: “Lyrical, voluminously expressive, beautiful in their knotted, winding intensity – Miguel Cullen's poems are intricate, funny for everyone but you, unpleasantly bright and brilliant.”

Cullen worked with videographers Ivar Wigan, Agustina Comedi, (a protege of Nan Goldin) and Fede Velar to place his collaborative video-poetry work in NOWNESS, Purple Magazine and Flaunt.

Journalism
Cullen was arts editor for The Catholic Herald. for seven years. He has also published music and art journalism in Vice (magazine), Wonderland magazine, The Independent, The Daily Telegraph, and The Quietus,; including long features on Dub music, the Bristol underground scene, and the history of Black cinema in the UK for Clash (magazine),    Recently he has written for Writers Mosaic, about the Jafaican dialect, and published a longread with them entitled ‘When mi was a youth I used to run up and down playing cowboy: A story of cannabis-induced psychosis’.

Cullen has also written one of few accounts of a meeting with the poet Frederick Seidel