Nii Parkes

Nii Ayikwei Parkes's poem "Tin Roof" was chosen for London's Poems on the Underground, making him one of the youngest living writers in the series. In 2014 the Hay Festival named him in Africa39, its list of the best sub-Saharan writers under 40.

Background

He was born in Britain on 1 April 1974 while his Ghanaian parents were studying there, and grew up in Ghana from the age of three or four. At Achimota School he worked on The Achimotan, and at 17 he co-founded filla!, the first national magazine run by Ghanaian students. He studied at Manchester Metropolitan University, where he began performing poetry.

Writing and publishing

In 2002 he co-founded the London publisher flipped eye, where he is senior editor. He has been poet-in-residence at the Poetry Cafe, an associate artist with BBC Radio 3 and British Council writer-in-residence at California State University, Los Angeles, and his play Walking Waterfall ran at the Almeida Theatre in 2008. He also writes for children as K.P. Kojo and set up a writers' fund for young people in Ghana. The French translation of his novel Tail of the Blue Bird won the Prix Laure Bataillon and Prix Mahogany in 2014, and he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2024.