Warsan Shire

“No one leaves home unless there's a shark's mouth at home.” With these words, among other things, the young Somali-British poet Warsan Shire touched a nerve in the middle of the European refugee crisis in 2015. Her poem 'Home' was shared worldwide as a call for a more humane policy and instantly made Shire famous. Shire writes about her own experiences as a migrant, about not feeling at home anywhere, about war, sex and being a woman. Drawing on her own life and that of her loved ones, pop culture and media headlines, Shire's highly anticipated debut collection Bless the Daughter brings to life the lives of refugees and migrants, mothers and daughters, black women and teenage girls in beautiful poems.

Shire (1988) was born in Kenya to Somali parents and migrated to England when she was one year old. The poems she published online attracted tens of thousands of followers on social media. She became London's first-ever Young People's Poet Laureate, she received the African Poetry Prize and she became the youngest person ever to be named Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She was translated into Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. In 2016, Shire co-wrote Beyoncé's album Lemonade and reached millions of new fans. Bless the daughter is translated by Radna Fabias (1983), born and raised in Curaçao. Fabias made her debut as a poet with Habitus, with which she won the C. Buddingh' Prize, the Awater Poetry Prize, the Herman de Coninck Prize and the Grote Poëzie Prize.