Michael Armitage: Crucible

The paintings and drawings of Kenyan British artist Michael Armitage (b. 1984) give shape to real and imagined histories, constructing deeply rooted impressions of the sociopolitical and cultural contexts that affect contemporary daily life in the region. These sweeping compositions combine visual references to recent events, the art-historical canon, the artist’s East African artistic milieu, and his own memories, while also generating space for the spiritual and the symbolic.

Marina Warner writes fiction, criticism, and cultural history. Her award-winning books explore myths and fairy tales; they include Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976), From the Beast to the Blonde (1994), and Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights (2011). Her essays on literature and art have been collected in Signs and Wonders (1994) and Forms of Enchantment: Writings on Art and Artists (2018). She has also curated exhibitions, most recently The Shelter of Stories (Compton Verney, 2025–2026), in which she explored the ideas in her most recent book, Sanctuary: Ways of Telling, Ways of Dwelling (2025). Since 2016, she has been working with the project www.storiesintransit.org in Palermo. In 2015, she was awarded the Holberg Prize in the Arts and Humanities. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, a Distinguished Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and a Fellow of the British Academy. She lives in London.

Warsan Shire is a Somali British writer and poet born in Nairobi and raised in London. Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head (2022) is her full-length debut poetry collection. She was awarded the inaugural Brunel International African Poetry Prize and served as the first Young Poet Laureate of London. She is the youngest member of the Royal Society of Literature and is included in the Penguin Modern Poets series. Shire wrote the poetry for the Peabody Award–winning visual album Lemonade (2016) and the Disney film Black Is King (2020) in collaboration with Beyoncé Knowles-Carter. Shire lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two children.