Somali-British poet and researcher Momtaza Mehri has won the 2024 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry, receiving a $1,000 award for her collection Bad Diaspora Poems.
Judge Aracelis Girmay praised the work as “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.”
Girmay continued: “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 tidalectic, 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.”
The Glenna Luschei Prize annually honours an outstanding book of poetry by an African writer.
Thirty year old Mehri started writing as a teenager and in 2014 began to be published in literary journals and magazines, including Granta and The Poetry Review. She was named as London’s Young Poet Laureate in 2018.
