A Craft Talk by Romalyn Ante: On Storytelling and the Myths of Ourselves

Date: Mar 7, 2026 (Saturday)
Time: 5:00 - 6:00 PM
Venue: Online
Registration: https://hku.au1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_cAVuCsAKPQOUGlU?Q_CHL=qr

Romalyn Ante is an award-winning Filipino-born British poet, novelist, and editor. She is based in the Midlands and currently sits on the editorial board for Poetry London. Romalyn was born and raised in Lipa, Philippines, and migrated to the UK in 2005. She writes in English as her second language. In 2012, she began writing poetry after completing her nursing studies and becoming a registered nurse. Her debut collection, Antiemetic for Homesickness (Chatto, 2020), was shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize and longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. It was Observer’s Poetry Book of the Month, and was named as one of The Poetry School’s Best Poetry Books of 2020. Her second collection, AGIMAT (Chatto, 2024), was awarded the Society of Author's Arthur Welton Award, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and Observer Poetry Book of the Month. Romalyn was awarded the Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship, the Silliman University Fellowship, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a lifetime honour that includes 'the best writers in or from the UK today'.

Her debut novel, The Left-Behind Child, will be published by Chatto in August 2026. In 2025, she received the Royal Society of Literature's Literature Matters Award to write the first draft of her novel-in-progress, Tanker Boys.

She founded Tsaá with Roma, an interview series with poets and artists designed to engage, inform, and inspire the public. This initiative has since expanded to include generative workshops for writers. She is also the co-founding editor of harana poetry, a magazine dedicated to poets who write in English as a second or parallel language.