Mapping the Future: The Complete Works

Mapping the Future offers new work by all 30 writers supported by The Complete Works project, including Warsan Shire, Raymond Antrobus, Mona Arshi, Roger Robinson, Inua Ellams, Malika Booker, Sarah Howe, Will Harris, Kayo Chingonyi, Jay Bernard, Yomi Sode and Karen McCarthy Woolf. 

In 2008 the level of poets of color published by major presses in the UK was less than 1%. By 2020 it was over 20%. The Complete Works Poetry – an initiative spearheaded by Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo – played a significant role in this change. Supporting 30 poets over a twelve-year period, The Complete Works produced an unprecedented number of prizewinners, including the Forward Prizes, T.S. Eliot Prize, Ted Hughes Award, Somerset Maugham Award, Dylan Thomas Prize, Rathbones Folio Prize and Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. TCW Fellows have also gone on to judge every major poetry award, and to take on significant roles in academia and translation, publishing over 40 collections. The Complete Works has become the most successful collective ever formed in British poetry. 

Mapping the Future is not just a magnificent anthology of some of the best UK poets, it is also an exploration on how poetry in Britain has become much more inclusive over the past 15 years: what has been won, and what is still being fought for. As well as poetry, the anthology also includes fierce essays re-drawing the map of British poetry by 10 of the 30 poets, touching on the most significant topics of our time.This anthology offers a timely insight into British poetry and how the voice of the ‘other’ continues to take centre-stage in pivotal times. 

Mapping the Future is edited by poet Karen McCarthy Woolf, editor of the second two Ten anthologies in The Complete Works series, with Dr Nathalie Teitler, director of The Complete Works, with a foreword by Bernardine Evaristo.

Shortlisted for the poetry category of the Sky Arts Awards 2024

Karen McCarthy Woolf is the author of two poetry collections and the editor of seven literary anthologies. Her debut collection An Aviary of Small Birds (Carcanet, 2014) was shortlisted for the Forward Felix Dennis and Jerwood Prizes, and was an Observer Book of the Year. Her second, Seasonal Disturbances (Carcanet, 2017), was a winner in the inaugural Laurel Prize for ecological poetry. In 2019 she moved to Los Angeles as a Fulbright postdoctoral scholar and Writer in Residence at the Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA exploring the relationship between poetry, law and the impacts of capitalism on black, brown and indigenous bodies. After returning to the UK, 2021 took her to Brazil as an artist in residence at the Sacatar Institute in Bahia where she was researching new work that explores sugar and its cultural and material legacies.

Nathalie Teitler works across the fields of arts, activism and academia. Born in Buenos Aires, she holds a PhD in Latin American Poetry (King’s College London, 2000). She has run literature programmes promoting diversity in the UK for over 20 years, founding the first national mentoring and translation programmes for writers living in exile, and is the Director of The Complete Works. In 2015 she founded the world’s first poetry-dance company, Dancing Words, which produces live pieces and films which have been shown at festivals around the world. She was appointed Projects Manager for the Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowships in 2018, and has been a director of Bloodaxe Books since 2021.