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Books and Publishing
Jason Allen-Paisant’s writing is widely recognised for its clarity of vision, inventive form, and deep engagement with questions of memory, belonging, and the natural world. Regularly featured in leading journals and anthologies including Granta, The Guardian, The Poetry Review, Callaloo, and More Fiya: A New Collection of Black British Poetry, his work spans poetry, essays, life writing, fiction, and scholarship—crafting texts that function as spaces for reckoning, healing, and imagining new futures. His newest book, The Possibility of Tenderness, extends this trajectory, weaving personal narrative with broader questions of history, landscape, and inheritance. His poetry collections—Thinking with Trees and Self-Portrait as Othello—have firmly established his reputation in contemporary literature: Thinking with Trees was named a 2021 Irish Times Poetry Book of the Year, appeared on the White Review’s Books of the Year list, and won the Poetry category of the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, while Self-Portrait as Othello won both the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the 2023 T. S. Eliot Prize, praised by judges as “a book with large ambitions that are met with great imaginative capacity, freshness and technical flair.” Across genres, Jason’s work tends to serve as oracle, balm, and portal—a space where Caribbean narratives, environmental wisdom, grief, desire, and belonging converge, inviting readers to dwell in histories too often displaced and to reimagine what it means to belong to the land, to language, and to community.
The Possibility of Tenderness
The Possibility of Tenderness
Longlisted for the 2025 Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing
“THE POSSIBILITY OF TENDERNESS is an extraordinary, necessary book from a brilliant writer: a new song of the earth.” Robert Macfarlane
“Here is a narrative of utmost urgency […] a necessary public corrective that comes via cultivating private space.” Marlon James
The Possibility of Tenderness is a genre-defying meditation on nature, memory, kinship, and the powerful yet sometimes fragile inheritances we carry through our relationship to the land. Moving between Jamaica and the UK, Jason Allen-Paisant braids lyric reflection and narrative to explore what tenderness might mean in the wake of generational rupture, migration, and estrangement from land. Both personal and political, the book asks: how do we claim space in the picture of nature —not as objects or emblems of violence, but as agents and collaborators—especially when so much has been withheld?
The Possibility of Tenderness | US Edition
For US readers, The Possibility of Tenderness holds particular relevance as it grapples with universal questions of migration, intersections of race, class, and nature, and the pursuit of dignity within systems of inequality. Jason’s reflections echo the struggles of many within the United States as he explores what it means to carry a history of displacement while imagining pathways to joy and freedom. Part memoir, part artist’s novel, this book bridges conversations about the global Black diaspora, and with its echoes of Edouard Louis’ work on class and mobility, it challenges all of us to reimagine what it means to thrive in a fractured world.
For me, tenderness is a radical stance. It’s a rejection of the idea that Black life must always be framed through suffering and struggle… It’s about the right to softness, to presence, to a relationship with the world that isn’t framed by oppression.” Jason discusses how The Possibility of Tenderness challenges traditional nature writing and explores kinship with the land as a source of power and healing.
Who said natural writing can’t look like this? Me talking about class, a non-romanticised version of nature, about people working hard, having dirt under their fingernails.” Jason discusses his journey from blocking out his Caribbean background to finding meaning in his connection to Jamaica’s Coffee Grove, exploring how black bodies belong in nature writing and the entangled histories between his homeland and Britain.
A humbling, cerebral memoir” that explores the question: “How do black people find tenderness while being threatened in this world?” The TLS praises Allen-Paisant’s journey from Coffee Grove (“back a bush”) to academic success, examining how he seeks “escape from the rage in which racism endeavours to confine” him through “forming kinship with the earth” and understanding that “history is land.
At first the concept feels unearned, luxurious even. But sit with it a little longer…” The Oxford Review explores Allen-Paisant’s central concept of our “right to non-anger” and how tenderness offers “the possibility of a form of living governed by sovereignty of our own time.” The review connects his work to Toni Morrison’s insight that “the very serious function of racism is distraction,” examining how the memoir invites readers to find “the tactile joy and sensuality of nurturing life.
Self Portrait As Othello
Self-Portrait as Othello
Self Portrait As Othello
Winner of the 2023 Forward Prize for Best Collection AND the 2023 T. E. Eliot Prize
Shortlisted for The Writers Prize 2023
The Poetry Book Society Spring Choice 2023
Poetic memoir and ekphrastic experiment, Self-Portrait as Othello focuses on a character at once fictional and real. Othello here represents a structure of feeling that was emerging in seventeenth-century Venice, and is still with us.
Portraiting himself as Othello, Allen-Paisant refracts his European travels and considers the Black male body, its presence, transgressiveness and vulnerabilities. Othello’s intertwined identities as ‘immigrant’ and ‘Black’, which often operate as mutually reinforcing vectors, speak to us in the landscape of twenty-first-century Europe.
"Absolutely astonishing!… Self-portrait as Othello is a masterful second collection: part memoir, part self-invention, part lyrical interrogation of the self as “other”. These poems force us to reconsider “the black male body”, its presence and absence from the renaissance of Othello to present day migrants and the poet’s own experiences of crossing the cities of Europe… Full of geographical crossings and liminal spaces, these poems confront difficult truths, upend stereotypes and the limits of language itself…"
"This indispensable collection explores Shakespeare’s pernicious archetype, observing how “the Moor remains invisible, despite the obsession with his body”. Yet Allen-Paisant makes the historical impasse an occasion for deep, generous interrogation of masculinity, and a linked elevation of the maternal that is at the heart of so many Caribbean and other families… Enriched by historical research, Self-Portrait As Othello celebrates representation, understanding and speech as acts of glorious resistance."
“Self-Portrait As Othello is a book with large ambitions that are met with great imaginative capacity, freshness and technical flair,” said the judging panel, made up of the poets Paul Muldoon, Sasha Dugdale and Denise Saul.
Thinking With Trees
Thinking With Trees
Winner of the Poetry Category OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature 2022
Shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2023
An Irish Times Best Poetry Books of 2021
A White Review Book of the Year 2021
Jason Allen-Paisant grew up in a village in central Jamaica. ‘Trees were all around,’ he writes, ‘we often went to the yam ground, my grandmother’s cultivation plot. When I think of my childhood, I see myself entering a deep woodland with cedars and logwood all around. […] The muscular guango trees were like beings among whom we lived.’
Now he lives in Leeds, near a forest where he goes walking. ‘Here, trees represent an alternative space, a refuge from an ultra-consumerist culture…’ And even as they help him recover his connections with nature, these poems are inevitably political.
As Malika Booker writes, ‘Allen-Paisant’s poetic ruminations deceptively radicalise Wordsworth’s pastoral scenic daffodils. The collection racializes contemporary ecological poetics and its power lies in Allen-Paisant’s subtle destabilization of the ordinary dog walker’s right to space, territory, property and leisure by positioning the colonised Black male body’s complicated and unsafe reality in these spaces.’
Praise for Thinking With Trees
"Allen-Paisant is uncompromising when digging down through the undergrowth of our imperialist past - and yet he succeeds in replanting new narratives in the same soil where these toxic ideologies used to, and still, reside."
"These observant poems lay their burdens down by the rivers of Babylon and try to sing the Lord's song in a strange land. What might it mean for the black body to experience nature, not as labour, but as leisure? What might it mean to simply walk through a park and observe the birds and the trees? The poems are beautiful and gentle, but the questions they raise are difficult and important."
"Allen-Paisant's poetic ruminations deceptively radicalise Wordsworth's pastoral scenic daffodils; here the body is never restful or relaxed due to a lingering unease in these British parks and woodlands. He employs the usual meditative tropes found in nature writing, in order to exploit and amplify the psychological sense of entitlement this relationship with the land denotes. These penetrable lyrical verses and essays deconstruct democratic notions of green space in the British landscape by racialising contemporary ecological poetics. The collection's power lies in Allen-Paisant's subtle destabilization of the ordinary dog walker's right to space, territory, property and leisure by positioning the colonised Black male body's complicated and unsafe reality in these spaces."
Engagements with Aimé Césaire
Engagements with Aimé Césaire
Through an in-depth grasp of the trajectory and core significance of Césaire’s work, Jason Allen-Paisant highlights a set of links it makes between ‘spirit,’ ‘poetry,’ and ‘knowing’. These explications, setting Césaire’s work in relation to a rigorously accounted for set of influences, reframe how we understand his writings, enhancing their philosophical, rather than merely political, aspects.
Engagements with Aimé Césaire: Thinking with Spirits is about more than Negritude (which has come to mean something less than a deep poetic sensibility with its own aspirational aesthetics and metaphysics, and rather something more like a fantasy-ridden iteration of pan-Africanism). It shows an Aimé Césaire deeply relevant to today: to the crises of ecological collapse, capitalist dystopias, and ideologies predicated upon fear and the threat of foreigners; and to contemporary chatter around interspecies collaboration and the need to rethink the entrepreneurial subject of Western political thought.
Recasting Césaire’s work is not just a matter of transforming a significant figure. It is also about rethinking legacies. This book is an engagement in the truest sense–the work of a contemporary Black poet who expounds the ways in which Césaire’s work articulates for him a new politics of the self.
Praise for Engagements with Aimé Césaire
Stunning, sensuous, and urgent, Jason Allen-Paisant's poetic meditation on the ecopoetics of Aimé Cesaire is also a wholly original philosophical inquiry into the shifting ways of being human under conditions of coloniality and climate catastrophe. He gives us a vibrant new language, deeply rooted in the ancestral lands and Black vitality of his native Jamaica, to engage the vibrational intelligence of the earth, and open ourselves to a regenerative ethics of life.
Jason Allen-Paisant introduces us to a pedagogy of spirit in which the rigid divisions of Western thought, and the rigid Western interpretations of Aimé Césaire, are transformed into a homage to the daily inspirited materialities of African/diasporic social poiesis. The most original and inspiring reading of Césaire in decades.
Jason Allen-Paisant is a Jamaican poet whose first poetry collection, Thinking with Trees, was published by Carcanet Press in 2021. His work has also appeared in PN Review, the Poetry Review and Callaloo. He teaches in the School of English at the University of Leeds.