Raymond Antrobus

About this episode

New Talk Art podcast! Robert meets Raymond Antrobus MBE FRSL, a British Jamaican poet, educator, and writer. His work explores themes of sound, language, identity, and memory. Born in Hackney, London, Antrobus was diagnosed as deaf at age six. He discovered he had missing sounds - bird calls, whistles, kettles, alarms. Teachers thought he was slow and disruptive, some didn’t believe he was deaf at all. His writing reflects a lived experience shaped by both mainstream and deaf schooling, and a profound engagement with questions of communication and belonging. The Quiet Ear tells his story - from childhood to fatherhood - and the stories of other D/deaf cultural figures, from painters to silent film stars, poets to performers - the inspiring models of D/deaf creativity Antrobus did not have growing up. Told with the electrifying prose of a poet, this groundbreaking and moving memoir explores family, identity, history and language, and what it means to be in a world saturated with noise. Widely celebrated, his poetry has earned the Ted Hughes Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. In 2019, he became the first poet to win the