Miller himself, writing in the Guardian the day after James’s Booker, said: “At different times, Marlon James and I attended the same high school, the same university, both of us went into advertising and both gave it up (at the same time) to pursue a creative writing degree abroad.”

The Guardian of 30 September 2014 recorded that Miller won the Forward Prize for best collection for The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way To Zion (£10,000). He was 35, born in Kingston, had financed an MA at Manchester Metropolitan University by winning poetry slams, and was then teaching at Royal Holloway. Two days earlier the same paper had him as one of twenty Next Generation poets, a drop-out from English at the University of the West Indies who moved to Britain at 25.

The Guardian of 8 July 2016 reviewed Augustown as “a vivid modern fable about Jamaica.” Things I Have Withheld (2021) was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize. Yale News of 8 April 2026, and the Windham-Campbell Prize site, name him a 2026 Windham-Campbell winner for Nonfiction (US$175,000). The prize page adds: author of eleven books; lives between the United States and Jamaica, where he was born; professor of English and creative writing at the University of Miami.

Sources

Sources: The Guardian, Kei Miller wins Forward poetry prize, 30 September 2014; The Guardian, Marlon James and the vanguard of Caribbean literary style, 14 October 2015; Yale News, Windham-Campbell Literature Prizes, 8 April 2026; Windham-Campbell, Kei Miller, prize page.