Podcast: The Wandering Book Collector, with host Michelle Jana Chan
A series of conversations with writers exploring what's informed their books and their lives around themes of movement, memory, sense of place, borders, identity, belonging and home.
In this edition, Michelle is joined by Daljit to discuss his latest collection of poetry, Indiom.
...click here to listen
The Guardian:
The best recent poetry – review roundup
After the solemnity of 2017’s British Museum, Nagra’s latest work is a mock epic set in a poetry workshop being filmed for a documentary.
It foregrounds a discussion of how writers from migrant backgrounds might – or might not – be read and accepted, and how they position themselves in relation to standard English, the canon and knowing “thy Blighty”.
This sounds forbiddingly academic, but indiom is a playfully giddy highwire act of sharp cultural and political observation, delivered with Nagra’s trademark linguistic exuberance: “Let’s not be scotched / from forking our fringe voice – it’s a migrant prerogative.”
Join Daljit, Matthew Hollis and Mona Arshi for a spellbinding evening of poetry at the candlelit bar.
Books will be available for purchase and signature in the bar after the reading where all are welcome to stay for a drink and chat to the poets.
...book here
PBS PODCAST in partnership with Arji's Poetry Pickle Jar
An exclusive interview with Daljit and the poetry pickler extraordinaire, Arji Manuelpillai about the new book Indiom.
...listen now
Daljit Nagra on writing poetry
Read Daljit's interview with the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society...click here
Hadrian's Wall
Around the old blown names
Birdoswald, Cawfields or Vindolanda,
each fortress and straight line of stone
partition was built by a zealous emperor
to keep out the barbarous.
I’ve come to this wall crowning England,
this symbol of divided man,
to honour the lineage of our tall ideals;
to ask, the more stacked, the more shielded
a haven, the cleaner the blood?
Where will our walls finally end? In
the gigabytes of our biometric online
lives, in our passports? To keep us
from trespass, will our walls be raised
watchful as the Great Firewall of China?
