#13 Lemn Sissay and the Story of Why

08/28/20 • 39 min

Lemn Sissay shoots from the hip and speaks from the heart in this interview about mother and baby homes, the Black Lives Matter campaign and his experience in the British care system.

“My name was changed, I was treated as property,” the poet and playwright Lemn tells City of Books presenter Martina Devlin.

Lemn was born in a mother and baby home in England to an Ethiopian mother, fostered out and returned to care at the age of 12 - as he tells in his powerful memoir My Name Is Why. But poetry gave him a sense of belonging in a world he couldn't fathom.

More info: www.lemnsissay.com

Lemn Sissay shoots from the hip and speaks from the heart in this interview about mother and baby homes, the Black Lives Matter campaign and his experience in the British care system.

“My name was changed, I was treated as property,” the poet and playwright Lemn tells City of Books presenter Martina Devlin.

More info: www.lemnsissay.com

Previous Episode

#12 Richard Ford on Flouncing and Failure

Richard Ford is listing his failures. He wanted to be a lawyer in the US Marines. That didn’t work out. He wanted to be "a lawyer, period”. That didn’t work out. He became a writer – that certainly counts as a success for the Pulitzer Prize winner.

Even so, between novels and short story collections he sometimes thought he was through with fiction and imagined doing other jobs.

But he kept going, he tells Martina Devlin in the City of Books podcast for Dublin UNESCO City of Literature. And that’s been the case for half a century.

Although when he’s between books, he claims to “flounce” around finding reasons not to work.

Sorry For Your Trouble is his latest book, a short story collection published by Bloomsbury.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/sorry-for-your-trouble-9781526620026/

Produced+presented by Martina Devlin with music by Daragh Dukes

Next Episode

#14 The Diplomatic Arts

Ireland's man in Washington, Ambassador Daniel Mulhall, talks us through the rhyme and reason of poetry - and how literature can act as a cultural bridge. He practises what he preaches by tweeting daily poems.

Also in this episode, Professor Chris Morash of Trinity College Dublin discusses who's in the shakeup for a valued and valuable award: the Dublin International Literature Prize worth €100,000.

Produced and presented by Martina Devlin.

Music by Daragh Dukes