Author photo: S Chadawong
Congratulations to Romalyn Ante, whose second poetry collection AGIMAT (Chatto & Windus) has been longlisted for this year’s Jhalak Prize, celebrating the best book published in the UK and Ireland by a writer of colour. Previously shortlisted in 2021 for her debut collection ANTIEMETIC FOR HOMESICKNESS, Romalyn is this year recognised in the new category exclusively for poetry collections.
Other authors nominated for the longlist alongside Romalyn were Khairani Barokka, Azad Ashim Sharma, Mimi Khalvati, Claudine Toutoungi, Nisha Ramayya, Rushika Wick, Amaan Hyder, Raymond Antrobus, Tim Tim Cheng, Karen McCarthy Woolf and the late Gboyega Odubanjo. The poetry prize will be judged by Jason Allen-Paisant, Malika Booker and Will Harris, with the shortlist due to be announced on 22 April, followed by the winners on 4 June.
‘This longlist demands to be looked at,’ said the judges of the poetry prize in a press release. ‘These are twelve poetry books by writers of colour published at a time when fewer than 1% of students at GCSE level study a book by a writer of colour. These are books saying valuable things in unusual forms. Like all good poetry, each book is uniquely receptive to the speech of our time, finding out the spaces in language where ideology inserts itself and picking it apart.’
‘It is clear in the ninth year of the Jhalak Prize awards that the quality of work being produced by writers of colour in Britain and Ireland is extraordinary,’ said Prize founder Sunny Singh. ‘The judges for all three awards, including our inaugural Jhalak Poetry Prize, have struggled to select only twelve books for each longlist and have chosen them with immense care, difficulty and heartbreak for all the books that they could not include. These books do not flinch from the harsh realities of our histories, times and lives. Yet they are also books full of love, hope and joy.’
About AGIMAT:
this charms the buried light of stars –
this deflects bullets – this unblooms a war –
In some Filipino clans, parents pass down to each child an AGIMAT, an amulet, in the hope its magic will protect and empower them. In a world of daily pain and loss, Romalyn Ante’s second collection asks: how do we keep safe what we hold most dear?
At the dawn of the pandemic, the poet – a practising nurse in the NHS – is thrown onto the frontlines of the war against COVID-19. Past conflicts swim into the now. When she falls in love with a man of Japanese heritage, it forces a reckoning with her family’s suffering under Japan’s brutal wartime occupation of the Philippines. Elsewhere, we meet the irrepressible goddess Mebuyan, who, in Philippine myth, nurses the spirits of children in the underworld. Here, she watches over young people in crisis – a girl who can’t stop cutting herself, a teenager who has leapt from a railway viaduct.
These are poems of strength and solace; they question what it means to fight, and what it takes to heal.
Romalyn is currently writing her debut novel, THE LEFT-BEHIND CHILD, a lyrical and vivid depiction of childhood and rupture inspired by her and her mother’s stories of leaving the Philippines to work and care for others in the United Kingdom, which will be published by Chatto & Windus in Spring 2026.
About Romalyn Ante
Romalyn Ante FRSL is a British-Filipino poet, essayist, and editor. She grew up in the Philippines and migrated to her second home, Wolverhampton, in 2005.
She is co-founding editor of harana poetry, a magazine for poets who write in English as a second or parallel language, and the founder of Tsaá with Roma, an online interview series with poets and other creatives. She was awarded the Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship and she currently sits as an editorial board member for Poetry London magazine.
She is the first East-Asian to win the Poetry London Prize (2018) and the Manchester Poetry Prize (2017). She also won the Creative Future Literary Award 2017.
Apart from being a writer, she also works as a specialist nurse practitioner. Her debut poetry collection, ANTIEMETIC FOR HOMESICKNESS, is published by Chatto & Windus and was an Irish Times Best Poetry Book of 2020, an Observer Poetry Book of the Month and a Poetry School Poetry Book of the Year 2020. It was also a National Poetry Day UK Recommended Read and was longlisted for the Jhalak Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize.
Praise for AGIMAT
‘In her spellbinding meditation on love and loss, hope is less “the thing with feathers” and more the thing with forceps… I felt grateful for the tender attention the poet affords to a hope that many of us hold dear: that as patients – that as people – we may amount to more than just flesh and bone. Thankfully, in the hands of Romalyn Ante the human self far exceeds statistics and the subtotal of all its scars.’ – Jade Cuttle, The Observer
‘Unflinching in detailing the physical and emotional exhaustion of [nursing], and also delivers deft political commentary… As she moves between the Philippines and the Midlands, and touches on her relationships with her family and partner, what unites the poems is her simple, beautiful language, and an awareness of the difficulty of healing.’ – Rishi Dastidar, ‘The Best Recent Poetry’, The Guardian
‘Ante is an alchemical wonder of a poet: unparalleled in her image-making, raw to both historical and contemporary damage and rich in cultures… Keep these poems with you as I will – always.’ – Fiona Benson
‘Romalyn Ante’s mesmeric new collection is deeply rooted in the dualities of life, cultural identity, and the profound interplay of personal and communal experience. Vivid, lyrical, and always surprising, it is a testament to those who navigate the complex legacies of history toward healing and resilience.’ – Nathan Filer
‘With precision, deftness, and at times playfulness, AGIMAT weaves in mythical and modern imageries, the universal with the intimate. The result is a powerful and hopeful collection, filled with heart and beauty, that illuminates us to the many forms that caring and healing can take.’ – Cecile Pin
Praise for Romalyn Ante
‘Captivating, playful, moving, witty and agile... an unforced poet with a lightness of touch and fortitude’ – The Guardian
‘Romalyn Ante is a poet to fall in love with’ – Liz Berry
‘Ante's poems are like embers, pared back to a slow-burning emotional core’ – Times Literary Supplement
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