Little Lagos Kollective (LLK) presents poet, playwright, graphic artist Inua Ellams

Little Lagos Kollective (LLK) presents poet, playwright, graphic artist Inua Ellams on the eve of his forthcoming books in conversation with Nike Awoyinka and DJ Edu; The Actual: The Actual is a symphony of personal and political fury sometimes probing delicately, sometimes burning with raw energy. In poems that swerve and crackle with a rare music, Inua Ellams, unleashes a full-throated assault on empire and its legacies of racism, injustice and toxic masculinity. ‘Ellams’ is a mineral-rich poetry, organic in its ability to speak across oceans, cultures and histories’ Written on the author’s phone, in transit, between meetings, before falling asleep and just after waking, this is poetry as polemic, as an act of resistance, but also as dream-vision. At its heart, this book confronts the absolutism and ‘foolish machismo’ of hero culture from Perseus to Trump, from Batman to Boko Haram.This new edition – featuring personal essays initially produced for radio, which unpack the socio-political history informing the poems – looks the world square in the face and asks, ‘What the actual…?’Of All The Boys: A deeply autobiographical collection of poems probing the end of childhood and the complications of Nigerian Hood, ‘Of All The Boys’ is a dynamic body of work that engages the cultural destruction and devastation of Britain’s looting and sacking of Benin City. Biog:Born in Nigeria, INUA ELLAMS is a UK-based poet, playwright and performer who has written for the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre and the BBC. His published books of poetry include Candy-Coated Unicorns and Converse All Stars, Thirteen Fairy Negro Tales, The Wire-Headed Heathen, #Afterhours and The Actual. He is a fellow of The Royal Society of Arts and The Royal Society of Literature. In 2023, he was honoured with an MBE for Services to the Arts and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of the Arts, London.‘Ellams’ poetry gleams with a dusty, worn, deeply original beauty and he remains such wonderfully generous company’  – Metro ‘Ellams possesses an intuitive and fluid grasp of the eternal virtues and heroic narratives that constitute our trans-global imaginations’ – Major Jackson