Mona Arshi – författare

LONGLISTED FOR THE JHALAK POETRY PRIZE'The most important anthology of the year.' Guardian Best Poetry BooksRevitalising conversations around environmentalism and ecopoetics, this new gathering of African, Asian and Caribbean diaspora voices is both urgent and inspirational.There has been a welcome surge of nature writing in recent years. Yet this has raised questions as to whose voices are privileged and heard in a space predominantly occupied by Western European traditions and authors. In Nature Matters, poets Mona Arshi and Karen McCarthy Woolf seek to redress this imbalance. Their genre-enriching anthology presents brand-new commissions alongside formative works from the past fifty years that invite us to reconsider nature poetry from global-majority perspectives. Image-rich and formally diverse, the poems explore fundamental and ecological themes including climate crisis and the Anthropocene; urban nature, solitude and alienation; protest and radical empathy; Indigenous wisdom and alternative histories.'A vigorous and timely hymn to the universality of nature. It's amazing that Nature Matters hasn't existed until now.' Sathnam Sanghera'An exquisitely profound and groundbreaking testament to our natural world by many of the most powerful poetic voices of our times.' Bernardine Evaristo'This anthology is a revelation.' Guardian Best Recent PoetryContributors:Victoria Adukwei Bulley, John Agard, Jason Allen-Paisant, Moniza Alvi, Anthony Anaxagorou, Raymond Antrobus, Mona Arshi, Andre Bagoo, Khairani Barokka, Dzifa Benson, Jay Bernard, Sujata Bhatt, Malika Booker, Kamau Brathwaite, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, Anthony Vahni Capildeo, Mary Jean Chan, Kayo Chingonyi, David Dabydeen, Fred D'Aguiar, Kwame Dawes, Imtiaz Dharker, Tishani Doshi, Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe, Inua Ellams, Richard Georges, Lorna Goodison, Mina Gorji, Will Harris, Ranjit Hoskote, Sarah Howe, Ian Humphreys, Sharan Hunjan, Ishion Hutchinson, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Anthony Joseph, Bhanu Kapil, Jackie Kay, Mimi Khalvati, Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa, Zaffar Kunial, Hannah Lowe, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Roy McFarlane, Nick Makoha, E. A. Markham, Momtaza Mehri, Kei Miller, Daljit Nagra, Karthika Naïr, Grace Nichols, Selina Nwulu, Gboyega Odubanjo, Oluwaseun Olayiwola, Nii Parkes, Sandeep Parmar, Pascale Petit, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Alycia Pirmohamed, Nina Mingya Powles, Taz Rahman, A. K. Ramanujan, Nisha Ramayya, Shivanee Ramlochan, Vidyan Ravinthiran, Roger Robinson, Denise Saul, Seni Seneviratne, Olive Senior, Warsan Shire, Jeet Thayil, Marvin Thompson, Derek Walcott, Kandace Siobhan Walker, Rushika Wick, Jennifer Wong and Benjamin Zephaniah.

Winner of the 2015 Forward Prize for Best First Collection Mona Arshi’s debut collection, 'Small Hands', introduces a brilliant and compelling new voice. At the centre of the book is the slow detonation of grief after her brother’s death but her work focuses on the whole variety of human experience: pleasure, hardship, tradition, energised by language which is in turn both tender and risky. Often startling as well as lyrical, Arshi’s poems resist fixity; there is a gentle poignancy at work here which haunt many of the poems. This is humane poetry. Arshi’s is a daring, moving and original voice.

'Wildly imaginative ... There is a spectacular wizardry to her words' Observer 'Quick before the story ebbs away.There are things I need to tell you'A work of great strength and equal delicacy, Mouth transports us to a world where violence hangs in the air, where beauty, pity and cruelty intertwine. The sequence at its heart, Palace, takes the overlooked women from the edges of Greek tragedy and places them centre stage, to tell unforgettable stories of survival and loss. With new depth and force, their voices set off echoes with women navigating the terrible reality and aftermath of war today.As a human rights lawyer, Arshi saw power and its abuses, the structures of silencing set against refugees. As a poet, she charts the movements and migrations that change the course of our lives – from child to adult, from home to elsewhere, from grief to what lies beyond.Mouth is a complex and original study of speaking’s limitations, chasms in communication, but also the unexpected power of silence: ‘sometimes / language picks us clean’.'Beautiful, generous and empathetic ... A poet at the height of her powers' Bidisha, author of Asylum and Exile'Delicately lethal; sharp-eyed and tender' Preti Taneja, author of We That Are Young

Following on from her Forward prize-winning collection, Small Hands, Mona Arshi's new book continues in its lyrical and exact exploration of the aftershocks of grief. These extraordinary poems, which see Arshi continuing with her experiments with form, relocate experiences in both past and future feeling, in both the intimacies of ordinariness and the collective experience of myth. Moving and discomfiting, these poems tune, in their acute emotional awareness of individual pain, to the dangers and unsettling violences of the contemporary world. Nevertheless, at the centre of this book is an overarching commitment to hope, in whatever form it takes, to the earth's tiny creatures, and its 'churning, broken song'.