Warsan Shire is a Kenyan-born Somali poet, writer and educator based in London. She was the unanimous winner of the 2013 Inaugural Brunel University African Poetry Prize. Shire has written two chapbooks: Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth & Her Blue Body.

In her first full collection Bless the Dauger - Raised by a Voice in Her Head (2022) Shire introduces us to a girl who, in the absence of a nurturing guide, makes her own stumbling way towards womanhood. The poems captures trauma and resilience, what it means to survive, to search for a home in the world, what it means to inhabit a woman’s body, the tensions of reconciling faith and family and everything that threatens the borders of expectation and obligation. Shire's poetry electrifies and is fiercely tender and heartbreaking.

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"I don't know where I'm going. Where I came from is disappaering. I am unwelcome. My beauty is not beauty here. My body is burning with the shame of not belonging, my body is longing. I am the sin of memory and the absence of memory. I watch the news and my mouth becomes a sink full of blood. The lines, forms, people at the desks, calling cards, immigration officers, the looks on the street, the cold settling deep into my bones, the English classes at night, the distance I am from home. Alhamdulillah, all of this is better than the scent of a woman completely on fire, a truckload of men who look like my father - pulling out my teeth and nails. All these men between my legs, a gun, a promise, a lie, his name, his flag, his language, his manhood in my mouth."

[Second part of the poem 'Home']