Janette Ayachi – författare

Winner of the Saltire Society Poetry Book of the Year 2019. Janette Ayachi’s dazzling first collection moves between remembered and imagined spaces as she celebrates the world’s variousness, and the energies and exhaustions of the body. Revelling in the many voices she might find for herself, Ayachi locates herself in both her Algerian and Scottish roots, her relationships with her family and lovers, her own motherhood, and an equally joyful but more precarious exploration of desire. More than anything, this book is a celebration of all Ayachi loves and has loved, especially her own daughters. It is a book that makes a space for itself in the disruptive pleasures of writing, in the face of all that might stifle her, alive to all the potentials of laughter and silence as well as song.

Shortlisted for the Saltire Society Poetry Book of the Year 2024Longlisted for The Laurel Prize 2024Janette Ayachi’s second collection moves away from the personal and delves into the universal with poems often taking flight from the page to parachute into performance. Her hypnotic voice lifts from a keen observing stance to one that probes the chemical reactions in nature, and especially in the body. Fire is seen as an element; as something environmental, a natural disaster. But Ayachi also plays with fire as a fuel in relationships; a heat felt and subject to synergy within the cells and flesh, a cardiac pulse, a love that comes quickly and burns slowly, constantly rekindling hope for change, peace and renewal. There is a mystic undertow that exposes the materials, the lore of bones and anatomy, pilgrimages and prayers, superstitions and super galaxies that she explores with language. Lost landscapes and lost loves merge as she confronts loneliness at the same time as showing us new bloom is on the horizon - that nature will always will us another spark.