All The Names Given cover art

All The Names Given

 Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

All The Names Given

By: Raymond Antrobus
Narrated by: Raymond Antrobus
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £7.99

Buy Now for £7.99

LIMITED TIME OFFER | £0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Premium Plus auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Terms apply.

About this listen

From the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2019

Shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2021

'[Raymond Antrobus] has built another beautiful paper house which you can spend a very long and deeply satisfying time inside.' Mark Haddon

'Moving deftly between tenderness and violence, hope and grief, praise and lament, this is a deeply evocative collection that will linger in the reader’s mind.' Guardian

Raymond Antrobus’s astonishing debut collection, The Perseverance, won both Rathbone Folio Prize and the Ted Hughes Award, amongst many other accolades; the poet’s much anticipated second collection, All The Names Given, continues his essential investigation into language, miscommunication, place, and memory.

Throughout, All The Names Given is punctuated with [Caption Poems] partially inspired by Deaf sound artist Christine Sun Kim, which attempt to fill in the silences and transitions between the poems, as well as moments inside and outside of them. Direct, open, formally sophisticated, All The Names Given breaks new ground both in form and content: the result is a timely, humane and tender book from one of the most important young poets of his generation.

 Black Creators European Poetry World Literature

Listeners also enjoyed...

 The Perseverance cover art
Rendang [English edition] cover art
Unexhausted Time cover art
Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race cover art
Seamus Heaney II Collected Poems (published 1979-1991) cover art
I Love a Broad Margin to My Life cover art
The Water Thief cover art
The Marvellous Equations of the Dread cover art
Hometown Tales: Glasgow cover art
Silence Is My Mother Tongue cover art
Surge cover art
Keeping the House cover art
Inward cover art

Critic reviews

[Raymond Antrobus] has built another beautiful paper house which you can spend a very long and deeply satisfying time inside.
Moving deftly between tenderness and violence, hope and grief, praise and lament, this is a deeply evocative collection that will linger in the reader’s mind.
[Raymond Antrobus's] poetry transcends speech, sound, silence, words – and what we are left with, when we close this astonishing book, is the vibration of the emotion on the blank page.
What a beautiful book Raymond Antrobus has written! I love it. So much pain, so much tenderness, so much music and invention and passion in All The Names Given. Truly, it is terrific. Antrobus has a special gift of making music from stories and giving his lyrics gravity and urgency that’s inimitable
In All The Names Given, the essential tension is knowledge. Knowledge of self, knowledge of others. These poems make the sublime leap or union of witness to ‘with-ness,’ so their knowledge is not speculative but holds together, beautiful and fraught, the broken burden of honesty: love. Antrobus is a phenomenal poet
These poems are revelations. In All the Names Given, Antrobus traces a new dimension where the irreducible particularity of self—race and gender, disability and sexuality, ancestry and futurity—buzzes with coded sound, refusing reduction. This collection is so obviously at the forefront of a new canon whose singular and evocative approach to lyricism and imagistic play demonstrates not only the necessity of our multilingual and multimodal realities, but 'the volume of their power,' too.
Raymond Antrobus is as searching a poet as you're likely to find writing today.
Raymond Antrobus gives a fully human response to our world in its beauty and cruelty expressed with humour, anger, love and music: ‘All The Names Given’ is a unique and crucial contribution to our new poetry.
So much of All the Names Given is this unwrapping of necessary communications: it is a gift of realisations for the reader to explore and come back to again and again.
All stars
Most relevant
I so, so loved this. I read the book in hardcopy first, to experience the poetry afresh, and then listened to the audio version. It was wonderful to enjoy Atrobus’ powerful poetry read by him. The audio/music production and closer captioning enriched it even further. Will be revisiting this many times.

Brilliant

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This title is difficult to review because I loved the poems here as much as loved Antrobus's first collection, but the audio version has a persistent soundtrack that comprises various sounds of rain and water striking objects, an enervating drone on a single pitch, un-pitched background noise, and horrible popping sounds, that mean that it is exceptionally difficult for anyone with misophonia or any other neurodiversity that causes sensitivity to certain kinds of sounds.

I really wanted to be able to just hear Antrobus speak his poems, as he is an excellent reader. Instead, over 50% of the poems here were marred (in fact, made impossible to listen to as far as I was concerned) by the horrible noises that were going on in the background and which, for me, crowded out his words, distracted entirely, and made me so anxious with the cognitive overload that I had to pause and then skip to the end of the affected track.

If nothing else, it gave me a chance to reflect on the difficult intersectionality of various audio-related forms of human diversity, a thought worth pondering. But I would only recommend this audio version to those who are entirely neurotypical.

Warning: persistent soundtrack

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.