BAD DIASPORA POEMS

114pp., paperback, Reprint, Vintage, London, (2023) 2025

ISBN: 9781529922561

Winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Sky Arts Award for Poetry, an Eric Gregory Award and the Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry.

In her exhilarating debut collection Momtaza Mehri mixes her own family's experience with the stories of many others across nineteenth- and twentieth-century Somalia, confronting the ambivalent nature of speaking for those who have been left behind.

"An exceptional debut collection that reinvigorates ideas around diaspora, migration and home. Wide-ranging and ambitious, her poetry shimmers with erudition and linguistic exquistiveness, while also having an exceptional heart. Drawing on global cultures, Mehri is a truly transnational poet of the twenty-first century whose words pulsate out into the world-at-large." Bernadine Evaristo, author of Girl, Woman, Other

"A poet like Momtaza Mehri comes only once in a generation. Mehri is writer of refined insight, audacious imagination and artful technicality - a genius.  Bad Diaspora Poems is a feast, its scope of movement both in time and geography is immense, you are swallowed into its voyage. This is an essential collection in the Black diasporic discourse." Caleb Femi, author of Poor

Somali-British essayist and poet Momtaza Mehri (b. 1995) is a 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. She works across criticism, translation, anti-disciplinary research practices, education and radio.