Momtaza Mehri’s poetry collection Bad Diaspora Poems was named the Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry 2024 winner on Tuesday, April 22, 2024.
The Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry is named for poet, publisher, editor, businesswoman, and philanthropist Glenna Luschei. Administered by the African Poetry Book Fund, it is awarded annually to a book published in the previous calendar year by an African poet. Some previous winners of the prize, founded in 2015, have been Tawanda Mulalu, Togara Muzanenhamo, Maneo Refiloe Mohale, Mangaliso Buzani, Koleka Putuma, Juliane Okot Bitek, Rethabile Masilo, and Kobus Moolman.
The 2024 edition was judged by Author Aracelis Girmay, and she selected Momtaza Mehri’s debut poetry collection Bad Diaspora Poems as the winner.
Girmay said of the collection: “a capacious book of restless, lucid movement. Atomic. Irreconcilable. Language made molten by the heat of Momtaza Mehri’s formidable intellect, her rigorous imagination and attunements to the granular. Unbossed. Sensuous. Though her work is of this world, I am stunned by the way she writes with what feels like a complete and gorgeous dismissal of the tyrannies out of which we emerge. What I mean is: though the effects of these tyrannies are ubiquitous and catastrophic, she does not stop seeing their made-ness, she does not accept their terms. Her imagination is more unbound than that. As she has said elsewhere: “Blackness discoheres the national subject…” Her thinking is dalectic and I return to this book for the ease with which she seems to carry our unboundedness. Mehri demands of us a scrutiny so vital, so diligent, that to read her is to be called into love.”
Bad Diaspora Poems, which was published by Jonathan Cape in 2023, comes with the following blurb;
The definition of diaspora is the dispersion of people from their original homeland. But what does it mean to write diaspora poetry? Momtaza Mehri’s debut collection poses this question, taking us from Mogadishu to Naples, Lampedusa to London. Mixing her own family’s experience with the stories of many others across nineteenth- and twentieth-century Somalia, Bad Diaspora Poems confronts the ambivalent nature of speaking for those who have been left behind.
We meet the poet, the translator, the refugee, the exile, and the diaspora kid attempting to transcend their clichéd angst. Told in lyric, prose and text messages, and taking place in living rooms and marketplaces, on buses and balconies, on transatlantic journeys and online, these are essential poems about our diasporic age.
Bad Diaspora Poems has already won the Forward Prize for Poetry 2023 and the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection.
Momtaza Mehri has also won the Young People’s Poet Laureate for London, Brunel African Poetry Prize in 2018, and the Manchester Poetry Prize in 2019.
Leave a Reply