Category Archives: Poetry

The small town with a big potato that inspired a global poetry win

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Robertson might be tiny but for poet and schoolteacher Peter Ramm, it is the secret weapon that helped him win the UK’s biggest prize for unpublished poetry

Robertson is a small, pretty town perched on the edge of the New South Wales southern highlands, almost teetering on the escarpment that falls away to the Illawarra and Shoalhaven coasts.

It is most famous as the home of The Big Potato – an appropriately tuber-shaped concrete monolith on the main street – and a triumphant rugby league team called the Spuddies.

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Royal family shares poem in tribute to the late Prince Philip by poet laureate

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The Patriarchs – An Elegy shared via royal social media accounts on first anniversary of Duke of Edinburgh’s death

The royal family have shared a poem in tribute to the late Prince Philip on the first anniversary of his death.

The elegy was written by the poet laureate Simon Armitage and shared via official royal social media accounts on Saturday.

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Warsan Shire talks to Bernardine Evaristo about becoming a superstar poet: ‘Beyoncé sent flowers when my children were born’

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One is a breakout poet, the other is a Booker-winning champion of Black talent. They swap notes on class, impostor syndrome and the day pop’s biggest star came knocking

When an email from Beyoncé’s office first landed in Warsan Shire’s inbox, she assumed it was some kind of prank. It wasn’t. Beyoncé – the real Beyoncé – was inviting Shire, a 27-year-old British-Somali poet from Wembley, north-west London, to collaborate. The result was the revolutionary 2016 visual album Lemonade, on which Shire is credited with “film adaptation and poetry”; her verses are read aloud between songs. Shire has also since contributed work to Beyoncé’s 2020 film Black is King and wrote a specially commissioned poem, I Have Three Hearts, to announce the singer’s 2017 pregnancy with twins.

But even before Beyoncé came knocking, Shire was starward bound. After a responsibility-laden adolescence, spent combining writing with co-parenting her three younger siblings, Shire published her debut chapbook of poems, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth in 2011, aged just 23. In 2013, she was appointed the first Young People’s Laureate for London and in 2015, her poem Home became a viral anthem for the refugee crisis. Shire’s first full poetry collection, Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head, comes out next month. In between these professional milestones, she also found time to meet and marry a Mexican American charity worker called Andres, move continents, and have two children.

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‘Is the world listening?’: the poets challenging Myanmar’s military

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Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh and beyond are using poetry to come to terms with atrocities – and as a form of resistance

It has now been a year since the military coup, and the breeze of democracy has become a dead wind in Myanmar. People breathe the air of fear and pass nights of rage and despair as men and women are shot or burnt alive at the hands of the Myanmar military. Villagers leave their loved ones at home and take refuge in the forest. Once-vibrant city streets have become rows of haunted houses. The whole country is trapped in a shadowland.

As Rohingya refugees, we are all too familiar with the military’s capacity for violence and destruction. Over the past year, Rohingya people have watched with terror and anguish as the same military forces that perpetrated genocide against us now unleash their atrocities across the country.

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Myanmar’s first literary work since coup reveals ‘courage and altruism’ of writers

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Picking Off New Shoots Will Not Stop the Spring was born from a desire to preserve online expressions of outrage, grief and dissent, say editors

The first literary work to emerge from Myanmar since the military seized control of the country a year ago reveals the altruism and courage of a new generation of writers, its editor has said.

Picking Off New Shoots Will Not Stop the Spring is an anthology of poems and essays, many of which were written during the military crackdown after last February’s coup. Others date from 1988 to 2020.

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Hungry for war: my journey from peaceful poet to revolutionary soldier

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Formerly an anti-war poet, Maung Saungkha has endured a harsh training regime to prepare for armed struggle against Myanmar’s military junta

Days after the military coup in February 2021, demonstrations erupted across Myanmar. The military responded by shooting unarmed protesters with live rounds. People were beaten, arbitrarily detained and imprisoned.

On the frontlines of protests in Yangon in February and early March, I witnessed soldiers and police firing live rounds into crowds, and on 8 March, I was one of hundreds of protesters who were barricaded overnight on Kyun Taw Road in Yangon’s Sanchaung township, where soldiers and police went from house to house searching for people to arrest.

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Margaret Atwood joins writers calling for urgent action over missing Rwandan poet

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More than 100 authors from around the world have written to the Rwandan president about the case of Innocent Bahati, who disappeared a year ago today

Margaret Atwood, Ben Okri and JM Coetzee have joined more than 100 writers from around the world in calling on the Rwandan president to intervene in the case of the poet Innocent Bahati, who disappeared one year ago today.

According to human rights organisation PEN International, Bahati was last seen at a hotel in Nyanza district, in the Southern Province of Rwanda, on 7 February 2021. The poet, who is well-known in Rwanda and had published poetry on YouTube and Facebook, as well as regularly performing at live events, failed to return to Kigali, and his phones have been switched off since.

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‘I’m free at last’: Uganda’s rudest poet on prison, protest and finding a new voice in Germany

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Stella Nyanzi talks about challenging Uganda’s President Museveni from her new home and why she had to leave the land she loves

The first few days of Stella Nyanzi’s new life in Germany have not been without their challenges, from navigating the TV and internet in a different language to finding the right school for her three teenagers. On the second day, the family went shopping for clothes – “thick jackets, mittens and scarves” – to see them through the fierce Bavarian winter. For her 14-year-old twins, who have lived their whole lives in sub-Saharan Africa and who insisted on wearing Crocs with no socks on the flight over, the sub-zero temperatures were a rude awakening.

At the centre of it all, however, has been deep sense of relief. Nyanzi, a 47-year-old outspoken scholar, poet and human rights advocate whose irreverent writing about Ugandan president, Yoweri Museveni, has seen her jailed twice, decided enough was enough. She has been accepted on a writers-in-exile programme run by PEN Germany, and has no intention of returning to Uganda while the 77-year-old Museveni is in power. And while there are many concerns about how she and her children are going to settle into Munich life, the sense of freedom is powering her on.

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‘Her thunder would not be stolen’: Damian Lewis speaks about loss of Helen McCrory

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Actor uses National Theatre tribute event to talk publicly for first time about wife, who died of cancer

Damian Lewis has spoken publicly for the first time about the loss of his wife, Helen McCrory, who died last year from breast cancer aged 52.

During an evening of poetry dedicated to McCrory at the National Theatre, Lewis paid tribute to the “one person whose thunder would absolutely not be stolen”.

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Mark Huband obituary

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Foreign correspondent respected for his work in west Africa and the Middle East who went on to write books and poems

Mark Huband, who has died aged 58 of pancreatitis and multiple organ failure, built a strong and lasting reputation over more than three decades as a foreign correspondent and business analyst, specialising in Africa and the Middle East.

He and I met when he arrived in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, in 1989 to take up the post of the Financial Times stringer and I was working for Reuters. He hit the ground running and, despite his youth, he soon became a well-known figure among the foreign journalists, diplomats and business representatives covering the west African region. He was sharp, engaged and committed to the story, and went on to work as Africa correspondent for the Guardian and the Observer before returning to London. He did not look at events from a distance but always saw something of himself in others.

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‘We’re taking the man out of the myth’: the musical reclaiming Rumi from Instagram

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A new stage production aims to tell the Sufi poet’s story beyond his aphorisms – and challenge assumptions about Islam and the Middle East in the process

He is everywhere and nowhere. The words of Jalal al-Din Rumi are found on sunset images pasted on Instagram and coffee mugs sold on Etsy; his poems have been featured in recordings from Madonna and Coldplay and he is reputed to be the bestselling poet in the US. Rumi’s observations and aphorisms on life may be endlessly cited – “You are not a drop in the ocean, you are the entire ocean in a drop” – but few in the west know him as anything more than a bearded Sufi mystic.

“Rumi has become a mystical, almost deified figure,” says Nadim Naaman. “The reality is that he was the opposite of an untouchable deity.” Naaman, a British Lebanese singer, actor and writer, has collaborated with the Qatari composer Dana Al Fardan to create Rumi: The Musical. “Our approach was to take the man out of the myth,” says Al Fardan, “and to present him as human being.” This is the second time Naaman and Al Fardan have brought a beloved Middle Eastern poet to the London stage. Their 2018 show Broken Wings, which is returning to London in the new year, was based on a novel by the Lebanese poet and writer Kahlil Gibran. It was the success of that production that convinced them there may be an appetite for a musical that delved into the life of Rumi.

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‘My Elizabeth Barrett Browning film needs a woman’s touch – but where are all the female directors?’

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Screenwriter of biopic about the radical poet says the industry must do more to get women behind the camera lens

A new film about a 19th-century poet and early feminist is crying out to be filmed through a woman’s lens, but it is likely to be directed by a man because there is such a shortage of female directors, according to one of Britain’s leading screenwriters.

Paula Milne has written a feature film inspired by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who campaigned against social injustice, including slavery and child labour, while living in fear of her own father. Milne believes that such a story, with its many contemporary parallels, should be filmed by a woman, because of the natural empathy that women have for one another, but that is unlikely to happen.

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‘We have to fight for what is right’: Patti Smith on gender, Sally Rooney and Cop26

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In the run-up to the climate conference, the rock’n’roll poet reflects – with a little help from her daughter – on a life spent breaking barriers, hanging out with Dylan and learning to Instagram

More than two decades ago, Patti Smith and a group of other artists were sitting with the Dalai Lama when the late Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys asked the Tibetan spiritual leader a question: what’s the number-one thing that young people can do to make a better world? Without missing a beat, the Dalai Lama replied: “Look after the environment.”

“I thought it was so beautiful,” Smith says in her trademark New York drawl. “That was his number-one preoccupation. Not to free Tibet, but to take in hand a global concern that was going to affect us all, on a scale we haven’t seen before.”

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‘A poem is a powerful tool’: Somali women raise their voices in the nation of poets

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A childhood encounter with a hyena inspired Hawa Jama Abdi’s first verse. Now she is part of an arts project designed to encourage women storytellers - and unite all Somalis

When Hawa Jama Abdi was eight years old, she got lost in a forest and found herself in the path of a hyena. In her place, many would have run, some would have frozen – but Jama Abdi, the blind daughter of Somali pastoralists, kept her cool, and composed her first poem. The verse ran:

I lived in fear of you, day and night
It is a miracle world if I am standing in front of you, tonight
Since I am blind and cannot see anything
Come to my rescue and let your voice be my company

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Jamaican dub poet Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze dies aged 65

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Influential pioneer touched audiences through performance, books, albums – and even Poems on the Underground

The pioneering Jamaican dub poet Jean “Binta” Breeze has died aged 65, her agents have confirmed.

Breeze, considered one of the most important and influential contemporary poets, was a regular performer at literary festivals in both the UK and across the world.

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The Butchers: novel set in Irish BSE crisis wins Ondaatje prize

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Ruth Gilligan’s thriller about eight men who cull cattle in rural Ireland wins £10,000 for books that ‘best evoke the spirit of a place’

Ruth Gilligan’s literary thriller The Butchers, set in the Irish borderlands during the BSE crisis, has won the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje prize for books that “best evoke the spirit of a place”.

Gilligan’s novel beat titles including James Rebanks’ memoir of his family farm, English Pastoral, and Nina Mingya Powles’ poetry collection Magnolia, 木蘭 to the £10,000 prize. The Butchers opens with an ancient curse that decrees that eight men must touch every cow in Ireland as it dies, and follows a group of eight men as they roam rural Ireland in the 1990s, slaughtering the cows of those who still believe in the old ways. The novel unpicks the mysterious death of one of the Butchers, whose corpse is found suspended from a meat hook.

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Prince Philip: royal family releases photo montage set to elegy by Simon Armitage – video

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The royal family have released a reading of The Patriarchs – An Elegy by Simon Armitage to mark the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral. The poet laureate said that he wanted the poem to address the duke’s values and personality. ‘A lot of the commentary has been around duty and service – I saw it as a prompt for writing something dutiful, and in service of all people like him.’

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Doubts cast over provenance of unearthed Sappho poems

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Original account of discovery is retracted by editors of the scholarly book in which it was published

When two hitherto unknown poems by Sappho were brought to light in early 2014, it was a literary sensation. The sixth-century BC poet is one of the most celebrated writers of Greco-Roman antiquity, a tender chronicler of the agonies of female desire, and a gay icon. But frustratingly few works by her survive, and those that do largely come from ancient papyrus fragments preserved in the dry sands of Egypt.

But now the editors of a scholarly volume in which the circumstances of the discovery were detailed have formally retracted the chapter because the manuscript’s “provenance is tainted,” according to a statement issued through the book’s academic publisher, Brill.

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From Soul Train to Beyonce: the joy of black performance in America

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In A Little Devil in America, Hanif Abdurraqib set out to celebrate black artists across music, dance, comedy and more, who succeeded even when their own country refused to honour them

When I began A Little Devil in America, I was thinking about Josephine Baker. The title of the book comes from Baker, from her speech at the March on Washington in 1963. It is a speech that is often overlooked. The legacy of the march so often centres on its male speakers (Martin Luther King Jr, A Philip Randolph), and Baker was well past her most notable prime. At 57, she chose to return to the US from France and make a small speech – but also to confront the country she’d left and vowed to not return to. The speech is at times tender, at times funny, at times teeming with rage. There was a fullness to it; Baker considering the vastness of her life and the many lives she’d lived. Her speech is defiant and brilliant, punctuated by Baker aligning her experiences with the national plight of black people in America:

You know, friends, that I do not lie to you when I tell you I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of presidents. And much more. But I could not walk into a hotel in America and get a cup of coffee, and that made me mad. And when I get mad, you know that I open my big mouth. And then look out, ’cause when Josephine opens her mouth, they hear it all over the world.

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