Raymond Antrobus has become the first poet to win the £30,000 Rathbones Folio prize, with his collection The Perseverance, which also won this year’s Ted Hughes award for poetry.

The British-Jamaican spoken word poet from Hackney, east London, was born deaf, but not diagnosed until the age of six. The prize is intended to reward “the best work of literature of the year, regardless of form”. The chair of judges, Kate Clanchy, said: “We chose eight books we loved, in different genres, and deciding between them was painful. In the end it came down to two books and a tense vote.”

She added that Antrobus’s The Perseverance “seemed, in our atomised times, to be the book we most wanted to give to others, the book we all needed to read”. She described the collection as an “immensely moving book of poetry which uses his D/deaf experience, bereavement and Jamaican-British heritage to consider the ways we all communicate with each other”.

The Perseverance, published by Penned in the Margins, ranges across history and continents to explore the poet’s diagnosis with deafness as a child, mixed heritage, masculinity, and his  father’s alcoholism and later decline into dementia and death. It also includes a fierce challenge of Ted Hughes’s description of deaf children.

The Folio was initially set up as a fiction prize but has since been opened up to non-fiction and poetry.

PHOTOGRAPH: GREG FREEMAN / WRITE OUT LOUD