Raymond Antrobus: ‘I have zero interest in framing myself as some kind of victim’

For most of his life, Raymond Antrobus has been considering the absence of sound. But, in his memoir, The Quiet Ear, he writes that no one realised he was deaf until he was around six or seven years old. His mother had bought a new house phone and watched in disbelief as her son remained unfazed by its thunderous ring. Soon after, she took him to an audiology clinic, which confirmed what she had already begun to suspect. He recalls sitting in the car after a hearing test when his mother pointed out that she ‘heard every one of those sounds in that room,’ but didn’t see him respond to any. At the time, he writes, he felt ‘deeply impressed that she could hear things that weren’t there’. These findings would shape his future and, as a result, his career.

At its core, The Quiet Ear is a story of the British-Jamaican poet’s upbringing and coming to terms with his deafness. But it’s also an exploration of race, disability, heritage, the arts, culture, and how these topics intersect. ‘I don’t just look at deafness as a medical idea,’ he says, speaking on a video call from the Civitella Ranieri writing fellowship in Umbria, Italy. ‘It’s a cultural one too, which means I have a whole wealth of culture from other artists who are deaf, as well as athletes, performers and public figures over the centuries.’

Despite having released six books before this – four poetry collections and two children’s picture books – The Quiet Ear is the 38-year-old’s first book of long-form prose, which he says ‘was hard won’. ‘It’s a different skill set,’ he explains, dressed casually in a simple yellow t-shirt with a dark brown neckline. ‘You need different tools, and it took me longer to get confident with them, but I’m proud of the prose in this book.’

Antrobus describes himself as a ‘poet, educator, writer and investigator of missing sound,’ which he says means ‘all my projects can be located on a shelf or in a folder’. But this label alone doesn’t fully illustrate the depth of his achievements. In 2019, he became the first ever poet to be awarded The Writers’ Prize (formerly the Rathbones Folio Prize) for best work of literature in any genre for his debut poetry collection The Perseverance. That same year, he won the Ted Hughes Award and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. And, in 2022, a number of his poems were added to the UK’s GCSE syllabus.

More recently, last year, he collaborated with the Guggenheim on a project titled Dynamic Disks, where he created a British Sign Language (BSL) poem in response to a 1933 artwork of the same name by the Czech painter and graphic artist František Kupka. He is also currently showcasing his first artistic installation, Heightened Lyric, in the multi-sensory exhibition Feel the Sound at the Barbican. The piece features seven flying kites, each carrying an extract from a poem as well as a BSL sign imprinted on the sails, attempting to translate the essence of each text. 

For Antrobus, these recent projects fall under his idea of what it means to be an ‘investigator of missing sound’. ‘I find the title is both a generous and generative one,’ he says, noting that it helps him stay focused on his intentions. ‘I realised I needed something to keep me away from writing or creating things for the market and grounded in what my vision is – what I’m actually trying to do and say with my life’s work.’ That vision, he adds, has ‘manifested in multiple ways, from writing to making sculpture’. Much of his work gives a voice to a subject that is too often overlooked and inaccurately explored: the lived experiences of disabled or, more specifically, deaf people. 

Now, as father to a four-year-old himself, Antrobus says parenthood has ‘reframed’ and ‘widened’ how he understands the past. ‘There are some things that initially made me angry because there were things that he did and that happened that I couldn’t imagine doing to my son,’ he says. ‘But, it was the eighties and the nineties, things were different then. My parents were fighting poverty, and there were a lot of things against him: 1980s English racism, Thatcherism, all of that.’

But, even with a project like this memoir, which might at first glance seem like a departure from what he has become known for, Antrobus insists that poetry is still at its heart. ‘As an artist and a writer, I’ve evolved and I now move through different mediums and genres, but in everything I do, the foundation of it is always poetry,’ he says. In The Quiet Ear, his evolving relationship with poetry is rooted in the story from typing on library computers to scribbling in workplace bathrooms, to the people who helped him hone his craft. ‘I am a poet first,’ he says. ‘That is my first love.’

The Quiet Ear by Raymond Antrobus is published by W&N.