Penguin Press signs Nick Makoha's ‘exhilarating’ second collection 

Penguin Press has acquired the second collection from Forward Prize-shortlisted poet Nick Makoha, The New Carthaginians.

Donald Futers, senior commissioning editor, bought UK and Commonwealth rights from Aparna Kumar at David Godwin Associates. Penguin Poetry will publish the book in trade paperback in spring 2025.

In The New Carthaginians, time – and with it the world – is out of joint. A hijacked plane lands at Entebbe International Airport in 1976, triggering the crisis that will lead to Idi Amin’s Uganda becoming a pariah state and, within a few years, to the young Nick Makoha’s flight from the country.

A mysterious writer daubs poetic slogans on the walls of late-1970s New York City, signing them SAMO©. Three characters who are also one – the Poet, a Black Icarus and a resurrected Jean-Michel Basquiat – journey through a time that is both our own and not, watching TV, discussing art and literature and tucking their wings into their jackets on the way to airport security.

The publisher continues: “Concerned throughout with flight and falling, the sample and the loop, The New Carthaginians is a poetry collection of staggering originality: a work by an author at the height of his powers, in which the familiar Western canons of art, history and philosophy are prised apart and reassembled in a new configuration. Drawing on Basquiat’s technique of the ‘exploded’ collage, our heroes’ odyssey gathers the symbols of a new mythos, through which the othering of Black life might be undone and the stage set for some fresh emergence, some transfigured understanding of myth and life. ‘Hold that note,’ writes the poet. ‘In this place you are no longer the chorus… In any future, remember you are a New Carthaginian.’”

Born in Uganda, Nick Makoha is a poet and playwright and winner of the 2015 Brunel International African Poetry Prize. His collection, Kingdom of Gravity (Peepal Tree Press), was shortlisted in 2017 for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.

Makoha said: “When the Ugandan poet Okot p’Bitek was published in The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry in 1963 I was not even born. But it was that book that opened the door for me to the African canon. When Penguin accepted my second manuscript The New Carthaginians with electric enthusiasm, that too felt like a door opening. I am excited to be on this journey with them.”

Futers said: “Reading this book is at times like watching Anne Carson, possessed by the ghost of Taliesin, riding sidecar with Thelonious Monk. Of course Basquiat and Icarus follow overhead, borne aloft by very handsome wings. Someone’s listening to J Dilla. Someone’s underscoring lines in Dante. Maybe they’re all on a plane. Elsewhere, locked in a room with men he doesn’t know, a politician is about to be treated to the local ‘hospitality’. The New Carthaginians is one of the most exhilarating, propulsive and sustained performances I can think of in recent poetry. We’re very proud to be publishing it at Penguin Press.”

Kumar said: “Nick Makoha’s The New Carthaginians is exceptional – it is as much poetry as history and politics, and I am in constant awe of its scope. I am generally very interested in counter-narratives; this one challenges the pre-existing linguistic and poetic conventions through the immersive lens of art – and the result is a long-lasting inner dialogue. I am pleased that it has found such an enthusiastic home at Penguin, and I am excited for all the future readers who are about to discover its quiet yet urgent power.”