Self-Portrait as Othello

Jason Allen-Paisant

Shortlisted for the Writers’ Prize 2024
Shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize 2024
Longlisted for the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature 2024
Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023
Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2023
The Poetry Book Society Spring Choice 2023
A Guardian and The Irish Times Book of the Year

Jason Allen-Paisant’s debut collection Thinking With Trees won the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for poetry and was an Irish Times and White Review Book of the Year 2021. In Poetry London Maryam Hessavi wrote, ‘Jason Allen-Paisant is uncompromising when
digging down through the undergrowth of our imperialist past – and yet
he succeeds in replanting new narratives in the same soil where these
toxic ideologies used to, and still, reside.’

The interlocking poems of his second collection, Self-Portrait as Othello, imagine Othello in the urban landscapes of modern London, Paris and
Venice and invent the kinds of narrative he might tell about his
intersecting identities. Poetic memoir and ekphrastic experiment, Self-Portrait as Othello focuses on a character at once fictional and real. Othello here
represents a structure of feeling that was emerging in
seventeenth-century Venice, and is still with us.

Portraiting
himself as Othello, Allen-Paisant refracts his European travels and
considers the Black male body, its presence, transgressiveness and
vulnerabilities. Othello’s intertwined identities as ‘immigrant’ and
‘Black’, which often operate as mutually reinforcing vectors, speak to
us in the landscape of twenty-first-century Europe.