Isabelle Baafi

Isabelle Baafi is the Reviews Editor at Poetry London. Her pamphlet Ripe (ignitionpress, 2020) won a Somerset Maugham Award and was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. She won the 2023 Winchester Poetry Prize, the 2022 London Magazine Poetry Prize (Second Prize), and the 2019 Vincent Cooper Literary Prize. Her writing has been published in the TLS, The Poetry Review, The London Magazine, Aesthetica Magazine, bath magg, and elsewhere. She is a Ledbury Poetry Critic, an Obsidian Foundation Fellow, and an editor at Magma. She has a BA in Comparative Literature and Film from the University of Kent, and an MSt in Creative Writing from the University of Oxford. Her debut collection Chaotic Good was published in April 2025 by Faber and Faber in the UK and Wesleyan University Press in North America. She is currently writing her first novel.