Alycia Pirmohamed – författare

WINNER OF THE NAN SHEPHERD PRIZEA BOOKSELLER SPOTLIGHT PICK'A truly original take on migration, family and faith' NOREEN MASUDAs a young Muslim woman, Alycia Pirmohamed grew up with her body as racialised and her faith as seemingly dangerous. Her affinity to the natural world - the mountains, elk and pines of her childhood - conflicted with feelings that she was unwelcome in these landscapes. By contrast, the stories of her parents' homeland - the monsoon winds, red clay roads and abundant korosho trees - felt painfully distant. Across interrelated pieces that travel from Midwestern Canada to East Africa, the Pacific Northwest to the British Isles, the award-winning poet traces the legacies of migration and memory on her life, examining the idea of homeland and the mythmaking it demands. She creatively resists the expectations of nature writing and memoir, at times choosing to withhold as much as she reveals.Shorelines moves from lavender skies to lighthouses, from surefooted ideas to liminal spaces. It asks what it means to carry hidden histories across borders and generations - and how losing family can mean losing the place they are from too. Above all, it explores how place and identity intertwine, and how our choices, our actions and the ways we build community shape us into who we become.

In Alycia Pirmohamed’s debut collection, Another Way to Split Water, a woman’s body expands and contracts across the page, fog uncoils at the fringes of a forest, and water in all its forms cascades into metaphors of longing and separation just as often as it signals inheritance, revival, and recuperation. Language unfolds into unforgettable and arresting imagery, offering a map toward self-understanding that is deeply rooted in place.These poems are a lyrical exploration of how ancestral memory reforms and transforms throughout generations, through stories told and retold, imagined and reimagined. It is a meditation on womanhood, belonging, faith, intimacy, and the natural world.Shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award 2023 and the Saltire Society Poetry Book of the Year Award 2023Longlisted for the Jhalak Prize 2023, the Laurel Prize 2023 and the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2023