Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry Awarded to Momtaza Mehri for Bad Diaspora Poems
British-Somali poet Momtaza Mehri has been named the winner of the African Poetry Book Fund’s 2024 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry, for her collection Bad Diaspora Poems.
Author Aracelis Girmay judged this year’s prize, which annually awards $1,000 to a book of poetry by an African writer published in the previous year.
Of the collection, Girmay wrote: “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 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.”
Momtaza Mehri is an award-winning poet and essayist. She is a former Young People’s Poet Laureate for London and winner of the 2019 Manchester Writing Prize. Her writing has featured in the Guardian, POETRY, Granta, Wasafiri, Bidoun, The White Review and on BBC Radio 4. She works across criticism, translation, anti-disciplinary research practices, education and radio. Bad Diaspora Poems is the winner of an Eric Gregory Award and the 2023 Forward Prize for Best First Collection.
Bad Diaspora Poems was published by Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Penguin. It is available for purchase online from Penguin and bookstores that carry Penguin’s poetry titles.
In addition to the winning book, Girmay chose Agnès Agboton’s book Voice of the Two Shores, translated by Lawrence Schimel and published by Flipped Eye Press as an honorable mention. Drawn from Agnès Agboton’s two Spanish collections in a single volume for the first time ever, Voice of the Two Shores is originally written in Gun, a language of Benin, the musicality of which is faithfully reproduced through the net of two translations.
The Luschei Prize for African Poetry, which was initially funded by late literary philanthropist and poet Glenna Luschei. The only pan-African book prize of its kind, the Glenna Luschei Prize promotes African poetry written in English or in translation by recognizing a significant book published each year by an African poet.
The 2025 Luschei Prize for African Poetry is open to submissions of books by African poets published during 2024 from May 1st till October 1st.
The African Poetry Book Fund is led by Kwame Dawes, Professor of Literary Arts, and housed at Brown University.