The Actual is a symphony of personal and political fury-sometimes probing delicately, sometimes burning with raw energy. In 55 poems that swerve and crackle with a rare music, Inua Ellams unleashes a full-throated assault on empire and its legacies of racism, injustice and toxic masculinity.
The first collection of plays from Inua Ellams, one of the UK's most exciting playwrights and a poet, novelist and graphic designer. Includes The 14th Tale, Untitled, Black T-Shirt Collection and Knight Watch.
Transformations between reality and surrealism are central to this work, blending contemporary culture with mythology. Iconic figures like Bruce Lee and Prometheus coexist amid striking imagery, such as burning twin towers and vibrant London sunsets. The narrative delves into conversations about memory's impact on the present, illuminating past experiences. Music plays a significant role, with references to artists and a unique lyrical quality in the language, reflecting Inua Ellams's exploration of sound and rhythm throughout the text.
A play by spoken-word artist and performer Inua Ellams, tackling capitalism and exploitation, as well as sectarianism and homophobia in modern-day Nigeria
The 14th Tale is a beautiful mellifluous narrative that tells the hilarious exploits of a natural born mischief, growing from the clay streets of Nigeria to rooftops in Dublin and finally to London by award-winning writer and performer Inua Ellams.
Newsroom, political platform, local hot spot, confession box, preacher-pulpit and football stadium. For generations, African men have gathered in barber shops to discuss the world. These are places where the banter can be barbed and the truth is always telling. Barber Shop Chronicles, which was partly inspired by verbatim recordings, is a heart-warming, hilarious and insightful play that leaps from a barber shop in Peckham to Johannesburg, Harare, Kampala, Lagos and Accra over the course of a single day. It was first produced by the National Theatre, Fuel and Leeds Playhouse in 2017 and is here publishedas a Methuen Drama Student Edition with commentary and notes by Oladipo Agboluaje.
From the award-winning poet and playwright behind Barber Shop Chronicles, The Half-God of Rainfall is an epic story and a lyrical exploration of pride, power and female revenge.
In 2015, Inua Ellams was poet in residence at the Poetry Library at the Southbank Centre in London. His #Afterhours project took him on a voyage of cultural translation and transposition through time and place, to the heart of the libraries' rare books collection, and through his own life's story as he selected poems published during each year of his life, from birth to the age of 18. In return, Ellams opens up a captivating and potent dialogue between poems, writing a diary and intricately-crafted poems of his own in conversational response to the poems he selected from the Poetry Library collections. Here, for the first time together, are the collected #Afterhours poems alongside the re-discovered poems which inspired them and the diary entries which follow this journey. In Ellams' meticulous hands, this becomes an entire narrative in its own right, compelling and magnetic, drawing parallels of displacement, language and reclamation, and showing poetry's great capacity to be a powerful amplifier of human experience.
A torn family. A hostile state. One heroic brother. One misguided son. One conflicted sister, and the second is on the run. A blistering retelling of the epic story from the writer of Barber Shop Chronicles, Inua Ellams This edition was published to coincide with the production at Regent Park's Open Air Theatre in September 2022.