Edward Adonteng is an essayist, poet, grower and researcher from South London. Published as a Contemporary Ghanaian Poet (Contemporary Ghanaian Writers Series 2024), his poetry explores themes of time, identity and humanity, as well as a reckoning with self. His work has been published in CING Magazine and Make it Plain. He is currently working on his debut collection.

A byproduct of the American Midwest, Taylor Beidler is a London-based writer. They were the inaugural recipient of the UEA New Forms Award through the National Centre for Writing. They were recently longlisted for the Propel Cambridge Poetry Prize and shortlisted in the 2024 Creative Future Writers’ Award. Their collaborative poetry with composer Aliayta Foon-Dancoes was a part of Plastic Language x Tenement Press in 2024. They are currently finishing their first novel and pursuing a Creative-Critical Writing PhD at the University of Essex under the supervision of Holly Pester and Steve Waters. 

Kathryn Blair was previously a 24/25 Barbican Young Film Programmer, helping to curate the Chronic Youth Film Festival: Against All Odds. In June 2017, she took part in creating  ‘A Poem For London’, at Spread the Word’s Young People’s Laureate for London Poetry Lab, and in 2019 was part of Apples and Snakes project, ‘The Writing Room’. Their chapbook The Death of the Cult Classic is published by kith books. Find them at your local independent cinema, or on Bluesky @kblair.bsky.social, Instagram @urban_barbarian, and their website, www.kblair.co.uk. 

Alison Clara Tan is a Southeast Asian writer based in London. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in fourteen poems, wildness, The Kenyon Review, Gutter Magazine and Washington Square Review, among others. She is a Brooklyn Poets Fellow, a member of the London Writers Centre's Poetics Lab 2025, and has been a resident artist at the Hawkwood Centre for Future Thinking. 

Godelieve de Bree is a poet and critic based in London, with poems in Propel, Tate, berlin lit and The Little Review. Her critical work has featured in Poetry London, Oxford Poetry, The London Magazine, LARB and The Poetry Review, where she is contributing pamphlet reviews over '25-26. 

Taniya Dennett Brown is a playwright and poet who is a member of the Barbican Youth Poetry collective 2025-26. She is an alumni of the New Earth Theatre Writers’ Academy and in 2025, she became a recipient of the Faber Open Book Scholarship award for her debut novel in progress, Whiteface. Dennett Brown’s newest play, ‘murmurs’, was performed as a rehearsed reading at the Omnibus Theatre in January 2026 as part of their Next Page season that supports emerging writers with developing new work. To follow her work, you can find her on Instagram at @delilahdennett.

Mariem Elhelali is between languages, between cultures, between dilly-dallying and making her way. She is an actor and writer at the National Youth Theatre, and a part-time philosopher at her university, King’s College London. Her writing centers liminal spaces, wherever she can find them. She is the youngest and least tech savvy Barbican Young Poet here. 

Johanna Gibson is a writer from the Virgin Islands (U.K.). She holds a BA in English from the University of Southampton. Her work has appeared in Moko Magazine, Sx Salon, Callaloo Journal and others, with a short story forthcoming in Virgin Islands Noir (2026). She was shortlisted for the Bocas Emerging Writer’s Fellowship (2022) and the Bridport Prize (2023), and is an alumna of the Obsidian Foundation Retreat (2023) and the Southbank New Poets Collective (2023/24). She was a recipient of the BVI Emerging Writers Fellowship 2025. In 2025, she performed poetry alongside the London Philharmonic Orchestra. 

Daniel Grimston is a poet, playwright and performer from rural Sussex. They are an alum of Barbican Young Poets, the Apples and Snakes Writers’ Room, the Royal Court Writers’ Group, and the Pentabus National Writing Programme. They are currently Poet-in-(Non)-Residence with the Right to Roam campaign and Singing With Nightingales. They’ve worked with organisations including 14 poems, the V&A, eARThworks Magazine, Emergence Magazine, The Dark Mountain Project, Kendal Mountain Festival, and the London Wildlife Trust, and have performed their poetry at festivals across the UK. Their first play, Corpselight, won the Theatre Royal Haymarket Masterclass Trust's Pitch Your Play competition, and was shortlisted for the Bruntwood Prize, the Papatango Prize, and the Theatre503 International Playwriting Award. Their second, FIELDFARE, was selected as a runner-up to the VCA Playwriting Award 2026 

Marianne Habeshaw (she/her) is a London-based poet and founder of Thoughtcast Collective. A Barbican Young Poet (2022–2024) and 2025 DYCP awardee for Finding My Queer Poetics, she was highly commended for the page Outspoken Prize 2023. Her work appears in LADA, Propel, Ink, Sweat & Tears, Porridge, Flipped Eye and Off The Chest Anthologies. She is working on her debut poetry collection Cartoon Logic.  

Noah Jacob is a Barbican Young Poet of the 2026 cohort. 

Sal Kang is a Barbican Young Poet of the 2026 cohort. 

Abu Leila is a writer interested in love, violence and revolution. Their pamphlet ‘The family group chat in times of war’ is upcoming in January 2027 with fourteen poems. 

Their work, preserving family histories of anti-colonial resistance, was shortlisted for the 2024 Wasafiri new writing prize and won the 2024 Ghassan Kanafani Resistance Arts Prize. Their writing on sex and gender today and in the Ancient Middle East won the 2022 Bridport Prize and the London Writers Awards. Their story about a really angry woman won a bronze 2025 Creative Futures Award. They are currently working on their first novel. Abu Leila hopes to see the fall of imperialism and capitalism in their lifetime. 

Bluey Little makes work in conversation with (or running from) her long covid. A former Traverse Young Writer and Playwrights’ Studio Scotland mentee, she has been a Barbican Young Poet since 2023. Her latest poems examine the ties between chronic illness, seasonality, and the climate crisis. You can find more of what she’s up to at blueylittle.carrd.co 

Nat Norland is a London based poet and theatremaker. They have writing in Death Kit magazine, and were shortlisted for the 2024 Aesthetica Creative Writing award and 2021 Jane Martin poetry prize, and longlisted for the 2025 National Poetry Competition. Their work with theatre company ‘why this sky’ was shortlisted for the 2025 Untapped award, and they have been nominated for an Off West End award for sound design.

Angela Okafor is a trickster, lurker, dreamer, and wanderer. She writes about (missed) connections, the club, birds, worms, and urban life - with all its discontents. She is an alumna of the Roundhouse Poetry Collective. Between 9am to 5pm, Angela researches how people engage with the radio and news. 

Leon Ray-Fernandes  is a Barbican Young Poet of the 2026 cohort. 

Jess Senanayake (they/she) is a theatre maker and poet. Their work spans a range of disciplines, including performance, stage management, direction and facilitation. They are part of the 25-26 Soho Writer's Lab cohort, and their writing has been featured in Brownies, THE FAT ZINE, and the V&A Museum. Jess is also an Associate Artist of Mad Jacks Theatre, member of Bush Young Company, and alum of Almeida Young Company and CRIPtic Arts' Reach programme.  

Credits include: My Brother’s a Genius (Sheffield Theatres); Don’t Drink the Water (Almeida Theatre); The PappyShow’s 10th Birthday Pit Party (Barbican); This Swollen Thing (Riverside Studios); For Too Free Won (Omnibus Theatre); island time (Camden People’s Theatre); Slave Play (Noel Coward Theatre); Pippin-50th Anniversary Concert (Theatre Royal Drury Lane); Your Lie in April (Theatre Royal Drury Lane); A Playlist for the Revolution (Bush Theatre); Saving Mozart (The Other Palace); NO I.D (VAULT Festival); RIDE (Charing Cross Theatre); A Monster Calls (UK and US Tour); The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (UK Tour). 

Lucas Sheridan is a writer, performer and crafter whose poetry on health, queerness, and nature has seen them become a Barbican Young Poet, Edinburgh Slam champion, and highly commended in the Solstice Nature Prize 2025. Lucas is a Birds of Paradise Young Performer as well as a Tinderbox Room to Play artist, focussing on interactive technology in art and performance. His poetry and literary criticism can be found featured on the Poetry Society’s Young Poets Network, in Queerlings and From the Ground to the Birdsong. 

Freya Shi is a writer, poet, art practitioner, wellbeing facilitator and astrologer bridging spirituality with critical thought in service of collective liberation. Having lived across two oceans, three continents, and four languages, her work is similarly transdisciplinary and transmedia. As a researcher-turned-practitioner, Freya translates critical theory into embodied and socially engaged work. Freya is the author of Unlearning, to Love: An Academic’s Memoir on Truth, Meaning, and Spirit (forthcoming), and a 2024 British Council Venice Biennale Fellow. Her work has appeared in Afterall and Moving Discourse, and she writes energy updates and astrology-based social critique on her Substack, Mythopoetics for the Living. 

Tajiyah Sulwana Tajuddin's work returns again and again to sound; how it lives in the body, how it carries memory, and how it survives. Rooted in her Javanese and Malay heritage, she is drawn to the textures of language: the rhythm of breath, the echo of prayer and the fragments of words that travel across generations. 

Her practice moves between poetry, performance, and voice work, often exploring how sound can hold what language alone cannot – grief, intimacy, longing, and belonging. Through spoken word, vocal improvisation, and collective sound-making, she treats the voice as both archive and instrument. Currently part of the Barbican Young Poets programme, Tajiyah continues to experiment with poetry as something embodied, something that can be heard, felt, and carried back through the body to where it first began: breath, memory, and home. 

Conan Tan is a Singaporean Chinese writer and undergraduate at the University of Oxford. His writing explores the politics of the Southeast Asian body and the queer philosophies necessary for survival. He was the winner of the 2024 Martin Starkie Prize and Singapore’s 2022 National Poetry Competition. Most recently, he was a finalist in the 2024 Oxford Poetry Prize and the 2025/26 Magma Poetry Competition. He has received support from Poetry Translation Centre UK, Spread The Word, and the Transylvania County Library Foundation. His poems appear in Ninth Letter, Magma, Pleiades, Salt Hill, The Journal, Cincinnati Review, Rattle, and elsewhere. Instagram: @conan.tan | Website: conantan.com. 

Annabel Taylor-Munt (she/her) is a poet and film maker who grew up in the North of England. She is a Barbican Young Poet (2025/26), has been published in The New Statesmen and had poems featured on Resonance FM. Previously selected as a Tetley Associate Artist, Whitworth Artist in Resident and resided at Hospitalfield Arts, Arbroath. Commissions include Big Screen Southend, Focal Point Gallery, Arts Council England, Arts Fund, Leeds International Festival, and Leeds Inspired.