WEALTH OF IDEAS

Warsan Shire is a 24- year- old Somali poet and writer, based in London. Born in 1988 in Kenya, she has read her work in Britain, South Africa, Italy, Germany, Canada, North America and Kenya. Her poetry pamphlet, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth , was published in 2011 by flipped eye. Her poems have appeared in Wasafiri , Magma and Poetry Review and in the Salt Book of Younger Poets (Salt, 2011). They have been translated into Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. The judges praised Warsan’s poetry for its combination of substance, urgency, power  and drama. Her work was described as, “…beautifully crafted, subtle and understated in its use of language and metaphor yet still able to evoke a strong sense of mood and place that touches the reader.” The Brunel University African Poetry Prize is a major new prize aimed at the development and celebration of poetry from Africa. It was founded by poet and novelist Bernardine Evaristo, who teaches Creative Writing at Brunel. D...

A view from Chisiya Hill; photo by Ken Wilson. The home surrounded by the brush fence belongs to my sister-in-law, my Maiguru. The road passing by connects many places, but its span here, from that little hill to Mototi Primary school several kilometers down is our piece of road. We walked on it on our way to school; it knows us, and we know it . The advice we often get is that writers should learn to let go of their work, to reach a point when we consider the draft done, when any additional changes we make would affect the art. This is good advice, but I am just not able to follow it. As long as I still have my draft, even after working on it for ten years, I will always find words to replace, sentences to tinker with, ideas to add. It is an opportunity to determine the work's future through further editing and revision, to make it say what it wants to say in the best way possible, and often, even after numerous revisions, the work may stil...