Musa Okwonga

Acclaimed writer, musician and performance poet.

A scholarship student at Eton College, he won the WH Smith Young Writers Competition, the leading national creative writing contest, at the age of 16; he went on to study law at St.John’s College, Oxford, before qualifying as a solicitor at one of the City’s top firms, Lovells.  He then decided to bravely realise his dream; leaving the corporate world behind to pursue a career as a poet, musician and author.

As a poet, he has performed at the 2008 EU Energy Summit in front of an audience of EU environment and energy ministers, and at several of the UK’s leading festivals, including Glastonbury and Latitude.  He has led poetry workshops at the Victoria and Albert Museum.  He co-founded the poetry collective A Poem in between People (PiP), and created PoeJazzi, one of the leading entertainment nights in the UK, providing a platform for the country’s best emerging talent of artists supremely gifted with words and music to new audiences; previous performers have included Beardyman, Dockers MC, Jamie Woon, Natty and Scroobius Pip. This superb show has consistently sold-out through the four years of its life showing at venues including The Roundhouse, Camden Crawl, Royal Festival Hall and Southbank Udderbelly in 2010. It has been TimeOut Critic’s Choice No.1 and received five-star reviews at the Edinburgh Fringe 2 years in a row, and in 2010 was named by the Southbank Centre as “London’s no.1 poetry and music night”.

In 2008 his first football book, “A Cultured Left Foot”, was nominated for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award; it was described by Simon Barnes, the Chief Sports Writer of The Times, as “the season’s most enjoyable book about the game, a wonderfully intelligent, football-soaked attempt to define the indefinable.”  It was also named No.1 in The Independent’s list of Top Ten Sports Books, and is currently being adapted for a television documentary that he will present.  He has since written a second football book, this time about managers, called “Will You Manage?”; this was published by Serpent’s Tail in October 2010.  He is a regular pundit for the BBC World Service and the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme, and has written for The Independent, the Daily Telegraph and the New York Times.

Musa is also a musician and has performed with the six-piece Afrofunk band Benin City, whose work has attracted the praise of Xfm’s John Kennedy and BBC3’s The Verb, on whose shows they have performed live; his music has been played on BBC6 Music and BBC Radio One.   Working with painter, composer and producer Giles Hayter, the other half of The King’s Will – a Faithless and Daft Punk-inspired project -he is due to release a fully-animated album, “As The Power Fails”, in early 2011.

He has been profiled by Channel4.com’s 4Talent, Prospect, The Times, and The Sunday Times, and he has modelled an Ozwald Boateng suit for the Times in advance of the 2010 London Fashion Week.

Musa is set to be a prominent figure in 2011, having already met the Queen due to his services in culture for the UK, and you may have also seen him in the new Jacob Creek’s advert on TV. Click here.

For enquiries with regards to Musa writing an article, poem, presenting, performing or organising a Poejazzi event please contact:

Philip Levine

Email: phil@twopennyblue.co.uk