Anthony Vahni Capildeo

Interview by Katy Hastie and Sean Wai Keung

Photograph by Aileen Lees

Trinidadian-Scottish writer Anthony Vahni Capildeo is the author of numerous works, including winner of the 2016 Forward Prize for best poetry collection Measures of Expatriation (Carcanet) and Polkadot Wounds (Carcanet), winner in the poetry category of the 2025 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. Earlier this year they were also awarded the prestigious Windham-Campbell Literature Prize. They spoke with Gutter editors Katy Hastie and Sean Wai Keung one glorious spring day, looking out over the sea, during a meal in Edinburgh.

KATY HASTIE: Firstly, it's such a pleasure to celebrate this moment with you. We wanted to start by asking you how winning both the Bocas Prize and the Windham-Campbell Prize feel?

ANTHONY VAHNI CAPILDEO: I'm mostly pleased that I can treat my friends! I wouldn't have written the poems in the book without continuing conversations. The other thing is that I had been looking forward to a miserable old age for myself. The risks I've taken creatively meant I haven’t been able to fix broken things in the house, let alone save up for the menopause. Now I have a little more security.

I had a complete trauma reaction to the prizes. My previous experience of winning prizes has been that other people have gnashed their teeth against me. Dreadful things have happened this time as well, but the good things outweigh them.

 As an activist writer I'm keen to see us all transition towards a more sustainable and survivable future. With that in mind, I'm using the financial freedom that the Windham Campbell Prize gives me to donate the entirety of the Bocas Fest Lit Prize back into Trinidad, and fighting against the violence that is being whipped up there, especially against Venezuelan refugees. The root of all that violence is poverty. I would hate to extract this money and take it to the global North. It's important to me as someone with the freedom and privilege to do so to donate that back into community ventures.

Compare this to after I won the Forward Prize in 2016. I was unemployed. Speaking to people who shouted in my face that I wasn't supposed to make a home in their city. So I used some of that money to move to Scotland. I got myself a haircut and bought some Solway blankets and from under them watched some of the horrible things that were happening in the press.

SEAN WAI KEUNG: Do you still have those blankets?

AVC: Even more of them. An entire chest full!

KH: How do you find self-care and community to sustain you through challenging times?

AVC: There are so many little things that people do. For example, when I was with my mother in the ER, and I hadn't eaten anything. Barbara Jenkins, the Trinidadian writer, responded when I texted her in desperation before dawn. She didn't make it feel like patronage; she framed it as natural...

Another individual moment was when I was in East Sussex on a bench waiting for someone. An Iranian refugee man came and sat with me. He said that I couldn't be left to sit there alone. He was talking to me very beautifully. It struck me afterwards that even though refugees are so minoritised, they act as hosts wherever they are. The right to host is such an important part of creating a shared home.

SWK: That hospitality is so underrated and generous. Do you think it can count for poetry as well?

AVC: I do think of poems on the page as something spatial – people can wander around in and spend a while with them. I don't think of them so much as a timebound sonic work.

KH: Is there something exciting you're working on at the moment?

AVC: Since 2013 I've been writing nonfiction articles for PN review. They're more fun to write than poetry. I write poetry on the floor or in bed, somewhere I can curl up and be my complete animal self. The poetry always feels guilty. But with the nonfiction, I enjoy writing prose in semi-public places. I want people to be able to think clearly about it

Carcanet have kindly agreed to publish a book of those essays next year, edited by Jeremy Noel-Tod.

KH: There's that accusation of narcissism that goes with poetry.

AVC: For me, the risk is a narcissism where I become some sort of rescue animal.

Speaking on narcissism, I had a thought, which perhaps everybody has, but I'm thinking of it right now because we're sitting next to the sea. Maybe Narcissus' fault wasn't to look into his own eyes, but not to notice everything else reflected in the lake. Which is like the myth of the individual hero versus collective support and the collective voice. It's easy to say that narcissism and introspection overlap, which is a narrow definition. Who knows who and what else might have been around in the lake at the time?

KH: We’ve talked already about you donating the Bocas prize money towards communities in Trinidad. What will be your favourite 'fuck you' about this time?

AVC: Being alive. So many people at a basic level, if you turn up and perform on stage, don't care if you're alive. You get paid late, you're out of pocket for travel expenses, there's no meet and greet, they don't care if you're minoritized or dyspraxic. You go through railway stations at an unsocial hour. You have trauma responses. You have to work with ‘MeToo’ guys, who laugh and gaslight you if you try to call them out. I've spent years where I didn't want to be alive. My biggest fuck you is that actually I’m alive.

SWK: And here you are, next to the sea celebrating! And you persisted in your poetic craft and performance. We wanted to talk to you about how you commit the spoken voice to the page. Things like different font sizes and types, for instance.

AVC: The idea of font sizes comes from Jeremy Noel-Tod, who typeset, designed and published Person Animal Figure (Landfill Press, 2005), my set of monologues in three voices. He took great care: the animal voice was in Garamond with serifs like delicate paws, and the person voice was shouty and nervous, in Verdana.

SWK: Would you count that as a collaboration?

AVC: Yes. The design was very much a collaboration. When I eventually went to Australia to the Poetry on the Move Festival, where I was poet-in-residence in 2017, I found that kind of attention to typography among people at Recent Work Press, and poets and critics who are also editors like Sarah Holland-Batt, who showed that there was an art of interpretative typography as part of the co-creation of poetry pamphlets. The publications were still attributed to their poets, but for me, the design enhanced my feeling that each of them was a work of collaboration, not individual heroism.

Now with Carcanet I have the confidence to have creative conversations at the production level, which is one of the characteristics of working with small, independent presses.

Going back, though – I don't want to put my voices in terms of 'I', because if I do then somebody will say 'but what if you are not a person who's like that?' I am nocturnal but trying to fit into the circadian rhythms of a diurnal world. I am more aware of the mixing of hypnagogic and hypnopompic states of mind. So finding my voice means finding the mixing up of the semiconscious brain rather than that utterances of the perfectly conscious.

Then, of course, growing up in a plurilingual household and country, or moving in plurilingual cities such as Oxford and Cambridge and Glasgow with changing populations or Leeds with variable populations that settled there. And not editing that. And learning from writers like Irena Klepfisz about how that might work out on the page. She was incredibly influential on me.

Thirdly, music, and enjoying the texture of texture of polyphony in the Middle Ages where you'd hear bits of a syllable being thrown into the air rather than the entire text. In symphonic or multi-instrumental works, one instrument, quality or rhythm that sometimes emerges. Creating something musical on the page is another aspect of poetry.

 Poetry's not a gift-wrapped commodity that you can put into your poetry bag.

SWK: Your word choices are so powerful, like the word ‘pleasecomeflying’, which you use in Polkadot Wounds (Carcanet, 2024), the sound of it is joyful, so invitational.

AVC: Yes, that's quoted from Elizabeth Bishop's Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore. I made it into one word because I wanted to make it an aerodynamic word that's hurtling, like one of the seagulls we might be able to see outside from here.

Polyvocality is also to do with gender. Ever since I was a child, I identified as agender, or I thought I could not grow up to be female, Not that I didn't want to be female or I didn’t want to be male. It just seemed to be not applicable. What that meant is that when I read books, instead of identifying with characters, I used to identify with a narrative voice. So, queerness and polyvocality, stepping outside and staging the play of other voices, they're very much intertwined.

And then the other thing is minoritization. Sometimes I use a colonial voice, which tells you how you ought to be or what you'd be rewarded for doing, as a voice of interjection or opposition. Sometimes that's based on real conversations I've had with people who can be very friendly but suddenly become obtuse, opaque, obstructive – or deliberately destructive.

My mother studied French and eighteenth-century philosophy at university. Nobody told me that I wasn't supposed to be able to read books. I was, what would nowadays I think be called hyperlexic. So, I read Diderot, and all these philosophical dialogues where person A and person B would be debating. It seemed natural to me to have these movements of dialogic debate in poetry.

This is related to poem as process rather than poem as object. That if the process of composition is always happening in the poem, then it makes sense to have these internal debates occur in completely ludicrous voices.

SWK: Do you think that your use of natural images and voices rooted in nature play into polyvocality as well?

AVC: Interesting. I thought you were going to ask about landscapes and soundscapes and whether sound comes before a poem or if a poem would be influenced by things like the barking of dogs or the wind in the trees or the particular qualities of rain. I refer to Kamau Brathwaite's theory of tidalectics, because of his way of writing with the oceanic and the elements of a specific environment.

I grew up in a Hindu household, influenced by Catholic culture. This means I was close to traditions which don't think about animals as not having language. for instance the Pancatantra folk tales or the slippage between species in reincarnation. And some beautiful children's versions of the Buddhist Jataka Tales. I also grew up with the spider god Anansi stories; I learnt later how West African traditions like Orisha permeate Trinidadian culture. It's a great mistake to dismiss any talking animals as anthropomorphic. That's an incredibly reductionist point of view.

I'm still waiting for Western science to catch up with the fact that animals have language and often in ways we possibly cannot either discern or measure. So, we have to understand the interspecies or animal world play has nothing to do with being a version of human language. All of creation is engaged in this divine philosophical debate. And we seized on a version of how it occurs in the animal world and the sages have passed through these forms. I mean, enough people have at least a cultural trace of this belief. A trans-species interconnection at the level of the spirit.

KH: It can be such an act of deep de-anthropocentrism to voice animals. I'm really interested in your use of plant life as well.

AVC: Yes. There was a terrifying tree that overshadowed my parents' house when I was growing up. I became deeply suspicious of trees, and I remain suspicious of trees.

Dark gathered in it somehow. It was of a species not native to Trinidad called a saman tree, although it's since been indigenised. Samans are shade trees with huge, heavy canopies, used on colonial plantations a lot. I didn't know it at the time, but the land upon which my mother's house stood was used as an internment camp during the Second World War. So foreign nationals were interned there, including a warship's worth of Japanese people – and also locals with German or Jewish ancestry. The shade tree would either have been a planting onto that camp, or it would have been left over or seeded from one of the colonial estates. In a sense, the tree did gather dark history in its roots.

SWK: I'm really fascinated by the ecology of islands as symbols and there’s a side to islands that's more human-embodied, like language evolving in isolation, so you end up with a certain idiom or phrase that is so specific to one place. How do you feel about your poems as islands?

AVC: I had not thought before about the poem as a kind of island of text on a sea page and therefore that's why my poems are areas of mixity, you can wash up on the shore.

All islands are like that. I wrote about Inishbofin, which is the westernmost island off the coast of Ireland. While the political right is trying to reverse-engineer narratives about indigeneity, these are the places where everyone had always mixed. They’ve always been mixing places because all you need to be on an island is to have a skill. If you can knit or manage animals, or be a doctor or a vet, then you can live on an island and do some poetry on the side. Think about it. If somebody had been on a long trip and picked up a so-called Viking who was good at working with metal, and then they picked up a silversmith who might be North African, and then eventually came back again to the boat’s home island, both those new people would be welcomed for their skills. The only thing is that they might have said to both metal workers, nobody can pronounce your names, so we're just going to call you Olaf. And that's how you end up with Olaf Silversmith in the official record.

KH: How do you feel about the future? You talked a little bit about the prizes offering a degree of security.

AVC: Well, my own family has a transgenerational history of chosen and forced migration and displacement, and knowledge of war and making war, so that makes the future feel uncertain. It's also why I live where I do, which in my fantasy is a defensible place.

KH: I think we're all feeling the need for weird safety nets right now, even if we know in our hearts that they can't offer us total safety… You have the new book coming out, but do you have any specific other projects you've got you're thinking this will help bring to fruition?

AVC: I'm working on a collaboration called Peaceweavers with Joanne Limburg and perhaps Alycia Pirmohamed right now, and how it's precisely because of all our different backgrounds that we keep re-experiencing personal and very real trauma through the current genocide.

We're being asked to agree that some people are not really people and we're being asked to pay for the killing to continue. We're being told that unless we agree that the killing should be paid for, you also can't have festivals. Nobody ever puts it the other way around. You know, unless you kill, you can't have poetry. These are equations we are being forced into with this particular state of war.

And so we want to take the example of the Threads pamphlet (Clinic Publishing Ltd, 2018) which interweaves Bhanu Kapil, Nisha Ramayya, and Sandeep Parmar’s voices. We want to do an interweaving with honest self-reflection and lament, and self-accusation, because we also have less honourable reactions. And try to make that into something in one set of covers, even if nothing we say is peaceable or at peace with each other. The peaceweaving is to weave these texts and agree that yes, we are bound together.

SWK: That takes so much internal honesty on everyone's parts.

AVC: I've been having problems with my reactions. I threw up in some bushes on the way into a festival.

SWK: I love that you cultivate so many collaborations in your practice. How do you know who will be a good collaborator?

AVC: If they don't try to seduce you! If they don't turn up with an axe and threaten to kill themselves in drunken guilt! It's quite a low bar! … They should have a strong sense of their own desires and form their own desires for the craft, while still having interest in being part of something bigger.

KH: Could we touch on the use of humour in your work?

AVC: I will say one thing about humour as a survival mechanism. In the Caribbean there’s a character called The Midnight Robber, who was a character I learnt the voice of and got apprenticed in. The Robbers taught me their craft, and the point of them is to incarnate fear. Not to ironize it,, but to voice everyone's worst fear in a way the people will laugh at it in horror. It's not really comic but is also deeply comic. The Robber will have a huge dark hat with things like skulls hanging off it, an enormous cloak and boots, a way of walking. And a Robber has traditional stories, so an origin story they'll make about when they were born and the terrible things they did, and how unnatural they were, and how useless it is to fight against them. And they will say all the worst things. You know, they call out environmental destruction, politics, church, family abuse, whatever, but in these amazing monologues, which have their roots in a specific oral tradition. You can't just make it up. You have to apprentice yourself and build the craft. Each Robber has to have a name. My name was Stranger Invader. It comes from a line of Martin Carter's poetry. The strange invader. ‘Watching you sleep and aiming at your dream.’

It's like therapeutic role play. It's done with the carnivalesque extravagance that you become your role play, the fear stalking the land.

KH: Real and visceral horror but at the same time, the ability to step back and look at that and see a complete counter-vision, a release and relief. It is so contradictory and paradoxical. I love that you can conjure all these different characters. I hope that they can allow you to celebrate going forwards.