Description
Join us for an evening with multi-award-winning Jamaican poet Jason Allen-Paisant in conversation with Jacqueline Crooks, author of Fire Rush.
The Possibility of Tenderness is Allen-Paisant’s first non-fiction work – a fierce reclamation of a link with the land, roaming from Jamaican hills to the woodlands of Leeds.
The event will include an audience Q&A; early copies of The Possibility of Tenderness will be available to purchase and a book signing with Jason.
About The Possibility of Tenderness
The Possibility of Tenderness is a personal history narrated through the lens of the ‘grung’ and plants/ It’s also a people’s history of the land, a family saga, an archival detective story through time. It’s the migration tale of a young scholar who arrives in Britain from rural Jamaica to study at Oxford to achieve ‘upward social mobility’ and who now lives in Roundhay, Leeds. Suddenly, amidst his journey of dreams and class aspiration, the plants and people of his native district, Coffee Grove, begin to offer different ways of living, alternative dreams, and the possibility of tenderness and the permission to roam England.
Marrying the local and the familial with global history and unfolding as a timely and immersive tale of land, environment, and the world of plants, The Possibility of Tenderness reveals how the history of a tiny rural village in a mountainous region of Jamaica is interlinked with that of modern Britain. And, also what that rural village can teach us about leisure, land ownership and reclamation today.
The Possibility of Tenderness is out on 20 March 2025.
About Jason Allen-Paisant
Jason Allen-Paisant is a Jamaican writer and multi-award-winning poet. He is the author of two critically acclaimed books of poetry, Thinking with Trees and Self-Portrait as Othello, which won the UK’s two most prestigious poetry awards for 2023 – the Forward Prize and T.S. Eliot Prize. He is also a Professor of Critical Theory and Creative Writing at the University of Manchester and Associate Editor of Callaloo Literary Journal. Jason lives in Leeds with his partner and two children.
About Jacqueline Crooks
Jacqueline Crooks was born in Jamaica and writes about the supranational and supernatural stories that sustain the diaspora. She writes novels, short stories and radio dramas. Fire Rush, her novel, won the PEN America Open Book Award and the Society of Author’s Paul Torday Prize. It was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Jhalak Prize, the Authors Club Best First Novel Award and the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize, and selected as an Observer Best Debut Novel of the Year. For her short stories, published in her collection The Ice Migration, she has been nominated for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the BBC National Short Story Award.
Event Partners
Dark Matter is an inclusive marketing agency that works collaboratively to connect
Black audiences with culture and the arts. Find out more here.
Round Table Books is an inclusion-led bookshop and community interest company.
They sell books for every reader and run community projects, based in the heart of
Brixton. They work with authors and illustrators that celebrate underrepresented
experiences. Find out more here.