‘The manosphere is dead and no one cares about Andrew Tate any more’: the poet taking on toxic masculinity

On a cold night in east London, 21-year-old performance poet Sam Browne is telling a packed room of strangers about his second bout of psychosis. “I was in Morocco at 18, completely alone, and I started to feel that things weren’t real,” he says. “It got so bad that one day I turned to a random person and told him I was thinking of killing myself. He just said back to me: ‘Don’t do that – you’ll miss the sunset.’”

The room falls quiet and Browne breaks the tension by launching into a poem inspired by his Moroccan breakdown, You’ll Miss the Sunset. “The world is so beautiful, the least you could do is stick around to watch it,” he says with the hint of a smirk. “But it’s all shit, all of it, isn’t it?”

The crowd of mostly young men and women laugh as Browne gallops through the rest of his set, tackling everything from sexual assault to accidental overdoses and male loneliness. Talking in plain terms and swearwords more than lofty metaphor, he is a poet with a mission, he says: to change the way men see themselves and support each other.

Read the interview in the Guardian.

[This piece was published on 01/04/26]