Panya Banjoko Author & Editor

Panya Banjoko is a UK based wWriter and Poet whose work has been published in various anthologies. She has performed widely including the 2012 Olympic Games. She is Co-founder and Director of a Nottingham Archive and coordinates a writers and artists network. She is also Patron for Nottingham UNESCO City of Literature. Her first published poem was Brain Drain published by Penguin Press (2000). Since then she has had poems published by Bloodaxe Books and in University Anthologies. Her poem, One Of A Kind was shortlisted for publication by Peepal Tree Press in 2016 and commended in the Writers East Midlands Aurora Poetry Competition 2017. In addition to publications she has performed poems on Central TV and more recently for a BBC Documentary about Olympian Jamie Baulch (2016). She was also one of the successful poets from around the country selected to perform as part of the crowd sourced, award winning film, Brit I Am, directed by the comedian Andi Osho. In 2016 she was commissioned to write and perform a poem for the launch of the Pathways Mural project which created the first community mural in the Hyson Green area of Nottingham and in the same year her chapter of a graphic novel for the Dawn of the Unread series was published by Left lion magazine. She has undertaken numerous residencies including Poet in Residence for the National Trusts 100 verses at Charlecote Park in Warwickshire in 2009 and 2010 and at the International School in Stuttgart, Germany and more recently Poet in residence at Nottingham Contemporary 2016-2017. In 2008 she won Women in the Arts Poetry Award for Outstanding Achievement. And in 2016 she was voted C-Hub magazine Performer and in the same year was selected by Left Lion Magazine as one of Nottingham's most influential Women.