On 17 of November Barack Obama touched down in Darwin for a visit that sent Darwin into a tailspin. The visit had been announced weeks earlier, giving Darwin time to spruce up for the visit. This included painting all the public benches on The Esplanade, where Obama was going to pay tribute to the US […]

This week I’m going to Melbourne for the launch party of the second issue of another literary journal, where I’ll be reading an excerpt from my story ‘Meeting the Colonel’, set in a fictional dictatorship somewhere around the Hindu Kush, in a loosely real maravilloso style. I blush when it read it now, with its […]

As an Australian-born Black British citizen, the issue of institutional racism in the ‘new world’ has been ever constant in my life, and my work. The long history of discrimination and violence by white English police officers  against Black Britons both within, and outside of, the police force has long been documented. Images of police brutality during […]

  I was at a poetry slam a few weeks back and one of the random audience-selected judges, who was obviously a frustrated critic deep down, described one performance like this: “Well, I think I’ll give it a seven out of ten. It was okay you know, but it didn’t quite cut it: it was […]