
His play The Dark was directed by JMK award-winner Roy Alexander and shortlisted for the 2019 Alfred Fagon Award. He was one of the 2019 T.S Eliot Prize Judges looking for the best new poetry collection written in English and published in 2019 (This was the first time that a Black British poet; Roger Robinson has won the prize in its 26-year history). He was a judge for Young Poet Laureate for London for 5 years and mentored four young laureates Caleb Femi, Selina Nwulu, Aisling Fahey and Warsan Shire. He has guest lectured at the universities of Suffolk, Greenwich, Goldsmiths and Roehampton. He has been involved in TV marketing campaigns for Voices Nationwide: Celebrating Fatherhood and the Gillette, Being A Man digital campaign for The Southbank Centre. His poems appeared in The New York Times, Poetry Review, Rialto, Poetry London, Triquarterly Review, Boston Review, Callaloo, and Wasafiri.
He has an MA in creative writing from Goldsmiths University where he was Creative Entrepreneur-in-Residence. working to create an in depth online digital archive of the Metic experiences of Black British Writers. The term ‘Metic’, first used by T S Eliot, translates as foreigners or resident aliens whose allegiances are split between their homeland and their new country. Makoha is exploring how the metic experience of Black poets can develop our writing and career in a hope to de-homogenize the Black Metic experience.
Carol Rumens’s best poetry books of 2017 Nick Makoha’s first full-length collection, Kingdom of Gravity (Peepal Tree £8.99), was the 2017 debut which most excited me. Focused on Uganda during the Idi Amin dictatorship, his poetry is charged with ethical sensibility. The lines protest as they sing “the song disturbed by helicopter blades…” but they don’t simplify things: they explore, and complicate. Personal witness and artistry are one. - Carol Rumens - The Guardian