Thembe Mvula is a South African/British poet and storyteller whose work is rooted in truth and curiosity, attending to what people and places reveal about who we are, where we belong and how we heal.

Thembe works across poetry, screenwriting, performance, musical collaboration and visual art. Exploring love, rootedness and freedom, her writing considers how these surface in the body, in Black and migrant memory, and in everyday intimacies.

An alum of the Obsidian Foundation, Barbican Young Poets and the Roundhouse Poetry Collective, Thembe has headlined nationally and internationally as a performance poet, including at the Tate Modern, Oslo Afro Arts Festival, Latitude and Dublin Book Festival. Her TEDx Talk on The Power of Poetry and Vulnerability has been translated into Mandarin and Cantonese. Her self-published debut poetry pamphlet was shortlisted for the Melita Hume Poetry Prize and listed as a Poetry School Book of the Year in 2019. Her poetry has been anthologised in Part of a Story That Started Before Me (Penguin Random House, 2023), Before Them, We (Flipped Eye Publishing, 2022) and The Black Anthology (10:10 Press, 2021), and appears in POETRY magazine, Propel magazine and Magma Poetry.

Thembe’s forthcoming poetry pamphlet, Cloud Vigil, will be published by Valley Press in September 2026.