Season's Savings | ₹5/mo for 3 months
₹199/month after first 3 months. Renews automatically. Terms apply.
The Actual
Failed to add items
Sorry, we are unable to add the item because your shopping basket is already at capacity.
Add to cart failed.
Please try again later
Add to wishlist failed.
Please try again later
Remove from wishlist failed.
Please try again later
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
₹0.00 for first 30 days
Season's Savings
₹5/month for first 3 months
Offer ends on 28 December, 2026.
Only ₹5/month for first 3 months.
Get 1 credit per month to use on any title of your choice.
Listen to anything from the Plus Catalogue—thousands of audiobooks, podcasts, and Audible Originals.
₹199/month after first 3 months. Cancel anytime. Renews automatically. Offer ends 28 December, 2026.
1 credit a month to use on any title to download and keep
Listen to anything from the Plus Catalogue—thousands of Audible Originals, podcasts and audiobooks
Download titles to your library and listen offline
₹199.00 per month after 30-day trial. Cancel anytime.
The Actual
Narrated by:
Inua Ellams
Buy Now for ₹546.23
-
Narrated by:
-
Inua Ellams
-
Written by:
-
Inua Ellams
About this listen
LONGLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2021
Including essays from the author published for the first time in print
'I was blown away by this book' BERNARDINE EVARISTO
The Actual is a symphony of personal and political fury sometimes probing delicately, sometimes burning with raw energy. In poems that swerve and crackle with a rare music, Inua Ellams unleashes a full-throated assault on empire and its legacies of racism, injustice and toxic masculinity.
Written on the author's phone, in transit, between meetings, before falling asleep and just after waking, this is poetry as polemic, as an act of resistance, but also as dream-vision. At its heart, this book confronts the absolutism and 'foolish machismo' of hero culture from Perseus to Trump, from Batman to Boko Haram. Through the thick gauze of history, these breathtaking poems look the world square in the face and ask, 'What the actual . . . ?'
'Bristles with energy . . . Consistently vivid' GUARDIAN©2026 Inua Ellams (P)2026 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
Critic Reviews
This is what poetry looks like when you have nothing to lose, when you speak from the heart, when you have spent years honing your craft so that you can be free. This is what poetry looks like when you are a word-sorcerer, a linguistic swordsman, a metaphor-dazzler, a passionate creator of poetry as fire, as lament, as beauty, as reflection, as argument, as home. I was blown away by this book (BERNARDINE EVARISTO, Booker Prize-winning author of Girl, Woman, Other)
Bristles with energy, reflecting how these poems were written, directly on to his phone in moments grabbed while travelling, between meetings, before sleeping, while sleeping . . . The square lyrics, prose-like in appearance, are consistently vivid, whether Ellams is taking on the biggest of subjects – Shakespeare, Trump, empire – or ruminating on quieter, more tender moments, especially on the endless failings of men (Rishi Dastidar)
This first collection is a masterclass in subtlety: poems that manage to be tender, angry, vulnerable, sad, funny, yearning and interrogating of history, both recent and long ago, all at once. It's a phenomenal piece of work about what it is to exist in this time, and his dissection of pop culture, colonialism, social interactions and the cruelty of the world, of men, of systems will be read and studied for years (NIKESH SHUKLA, editor of The Good Immigrant)
No reviews yet