Join us at the bookshop to listen to Momtaza Mehri read and talk about Bad Diaspora Poems, the much-awaited debut collection from a remarkable poetic voice.
Diaspora is witnessing a murder without getting blood on your shirt.
Momtaza Mehri is an award-winning former Young People’s Poet Laureate for London and winner of the 2019 Manchester Writing Prize. Her writing has featured in the Guardian, POETRY, Granta, Wasafiri, Bidoun, The White Review and on BBC Radio 4.
The definition of diaspora is the dispersion of people from their original homeland. But what does it mean to write diaspora poetry?
Mehri’s exhilarating debut collection poses this question, spanning the waves of movement to and from Somalia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, taking us from Mogadishu to Naples, Lampedusa to London. We arrive at the present day, where these inherited histories and silences have endured across generations.