Musa Okwonga is an Oxford University graduate who since then has practised both law and football, with the emphasis on the latter. He won the Junior Bridport Prize for fiction in 1994, for poetry in 1995, and the WH Smith Young Writers competition a year later. He lives in South London.

Okwonga considers himself a poet, a sportswriter, a PR professional, an author, and an occasional MC. Okwonga’s poetry, which he often writes on London buses, travelling entire routes in order to be immersed in humanity, displays astonishing subtlety of observation. “The language has to be a vehicle for the story, the message,” Okwonga says. “Otherwise, it’s just intellectual showboating. People go to poetry gigs to hear intellectual honesty.” In his poetry, as in his life, that is exactly what they get. Okwonga is also a founding member of Poetry collective “A poem in between people” (PIP).