In 2018 Roy McFarlane launched a collection of poetry The Healing the Next Time which was a Poetry Book Society Winter Recommendation and was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award 2018 following the success of Beginning With Your Last Breath in 2016, both published by Nine Arches Press. Roy has been Poet in Residence for a day in a WS Graham installation at the National Poetry Library in 2019.
In 1968 Enoch Powell delivered his famous Rivers of Blood speech which had a major effect on the Windrush generation. Roy’s Jerwood Bursary will fund research looking into the poet’s birth mother, her story from Jamaica to England, England to Canada, and other women of Windrush, mothers and daughters, voices drawn from troubled waters.
