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Look We Have Coming to Dover!, the remarkable debut by Daljit Nagra, marked the arrival of a thrilling new voice in poetry and won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection along the way. In this, his second volume, his writing shows every bit the same verve and excitement that made his first book an unmissable event. Tippoo Sultan’s Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger Toy-Machine!!! takes its cue from the eighteenth-century automaton (a tiger savaging a British soldier) in a series of poems that begin at the throat of the old British Empire. In these vivid, real and sometimes surreal pieces, Daljit Nagra creates his own inimitable linguistic bhaji: where Shakespeare meets the Subcontinent in a range of forms from English sonnets to spectacular displays of ‘bollyverse’ or the tender love songs of the monsoon. The poems take their bearings from cornershops and classrooms, the strange, part-arcadian, part-hellish streets of ‘Londonstan’ and the places where the north of England collides with the Punjab: from Larkin to the ladoos in Raja t’Wonder Dog. Little escapes Nagra’s tigerish gaze: race relations, family feuds, cultural inheritance, religious bigotry, the British honours system, Rudyard Kipling, the blurring of Kevin Keegan with Kabbadi. Comic, hard-hitting, passionate, satirical, Daljit Nagra has written a book that is as powerfully thought-provoking as it is delightful.
Daljit Nagra was born into a working class, Sikh family in London. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London, Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, on the Council of the Society of Authors, Advisor to Poetry By Heart, and presents the weekly Poetry Extra on Radio 4 Extra. Nagra’s collections have won the Foward Prize for…
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Read Dalit Nagra’s poem commissioned for the Coronation Concert’s ‘Lighting up the Nation’ live sequence.
To celebrate Independent Bookshop Week 2022, we dust off lists of indie bookshops all over the UK that are loved …