Will Harris

Will Harris is a poet, editor and essayist from London. His first book, Mixed-Race Superman (Peninsula Press, 2018), is about masculinity, race science and Keanu Reeves. He is the author of the poetry books RENDANG (2020) and Brother Poem (2023), both published by Granta in the UK and Wesleyan University Press in the United States. 

He was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem 2018 for ‘SAY’ (Poetry Review) and won a Poetry Fellowship from the Arts Foundation in 2019. RENDANG went on to win the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. Brother Poem was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and work from it was exhibited in An Incomplete A to Z for Art and Poetry (11–26 February 2022) at 30 Old Burlington Street in London.

Harris co-translated Habib Tengour’s Consolatio (Poetry Translation Centre) with Delaina Haslam in 2022, and he has facilitated the Southbank Centre’s New Poets Collective with Vanessa Kisuule. Siblings, a conversation between Harris, Jay Bernard, Mary Jean Chan, and Nisha Ramayya, was published by Monitor Books in 2024. Alongside writing, Harris was an Activity Worker in extra-care homes in East London from 2021 to 2024. He has also held the Burgess Fellowship at the University of Manchester and was a Poetry Fellow at UEA where he worked on developing a new archive of work by contemporary poets. From 2024–25, he was a fellow at Columbia University’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris.