Poetry on Vinyl

In 2021, award-winning poet, novelist and musician Anthony Joseph was invited to curate a selection of records to inaugurate the audio collection at Manchester Poetry Library. Anthony introduced this collection, playing selected records as part of a special lecture that blended music and poetry. He was joined by Andrew John on bass, who has been a mainstay of Anthony’s core of musicians for over 10 years.

For this special exhibition, Manchester Poetry Library is showcasing the entire selection of Anthony’s records and has made the event available to view online too. We invite you to browse, watch and listen to this tour of poetry on vinyl from the early 20th century to the present day.

Anthony Joseph is an award-winning Trinidad-born poet, novelist, academic and musician. He is the author of four poetry collections and three novels. His 2018 novel Kitch: A Fictional Biography of a Calypso Icon was shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award, and longlisted for the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. His most recent publication is the experimental novel The Frequency of Magic. In 2019, he was awarded a Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship. In 2020 a Polish translation of his afro-futurist classic The African Origins of UFOs was published, followed by a Spanish edition of Kitch. As a musician, he has released eight critically acclaimed albums, and in 2020 received a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Composers Award. He is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at De Montfort University, Leicester.