It’s a female cat, he volunteers, because he had originally intended to adopt a male but took pity on the runt of the litter and couldn’t be bothered to think up a new name.

You don't even need to be a poetry fan to enjoy this, it's just exceptional stories told with heart and soul. I am exhausted by the BBC’s continuing charade that black masculinity can only be represented through violence. The problem was not that the kids were unreachable, he stresses, but that he had blundered into the straitjacket of the “Gove curriculum”, in which the then education minister Michael Gove had imposed strict limits on what could be taught. I May Destroy You and Poor foreground those stories criminally overlooked, neglected or silenced in media and literature (arguably also in society more widely).I didn’t have the best experience of school growing up, but there was still space for your imagination and your individualism to at least stretch its legs a little bit. In 2020, Caleb Femi released his award-winning debut poetry collection, Poor, reflecting on his experiences growing up on the North Peckham estate. His point, he says, is “that often these boys are just as delicate as we can ever imagine them to be. As artists, both Coel and Femi have both done something revolutionary, political and vital with their art form, foregrounding the lived inner-city experiences of black people in the UK today.

In Coping, he encapsulates the fear that black boys feel when playing out, when the rest of the world pretends to be scared by them, Dark skin boys scare everything in the dark / though really / we’re just trying to scare away the dark. A few months later the mural was demolished, along with the tower block where the Femi family lived, and they were moved to a four-bedroom terrace house down the road.

Home was “one bedroom and seven bodies making do” on the 13th floor of a tower block: “But all of a sudden that space was transformed by my eight-year-old imagination into a wonderland where everything felt shiny and bouncy,” he says. Nobody today can remember exactly what it looked like except that it radiated bright colours across the concrete, and became a gathering point for the community. Every good thing that happened on the estate was slammed into conjunction with that mural,” he says. For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin. He had only properly met his parents less than a year earlier, because they had emigrated to London from Nigeria when he was a baby, leaving their children behind with a grandfather and an uncle until they had saved enough money to bring them over.

He has written and directed short films for the BBC and Channel 4, and poems for Tate Modern, the Royal Society for Literature, St Paul's Cathedral, the BBC, the Guardian and more.

In one, he imagines a boy pouring himself into his hood like a raindrop: “Each tree grateful for the / wet boy, unaware that the outside world sees this boy as a / chainsaw.