Joint winner of the James Berry Poetry Prize

In her wide-ranging debut collection, Clementine Ewokolo Burnley asks what remains after once-familiar places and people have gone. The poems criss-cross the Atlantic, beginning in the 1850s. The voices of Caribbean returnees to the west African coast mingle with those of west African recaptives, German missionaries, and kidnappers. They witness the changes in family life through the generations as villagers or townsfolk are uprooted or stay put or uproot themselves, defying expectations by leaving or returning.

Her poems address the past only to illuminate what people can become to each other in the present, whether in Africa or Europe. In one sequence a group of university students from far-flung parts discover the freedoms of student halls in Glasgow. In sequences set in the Hebrides old friends recognise a late-blooming love after decades apart. In other poems, a woman consults her scars. Each sight, sound or smell has its threat value in Germany, and children of mixed heritage switch between languages in Italy. Weary of searching outward, women drop anchor in themselves. A couple find grounding in the non-human world that surrounds them. Going back in search of belonging proves futile only because connection was there all along.

Clementine Ewokolo Burnley was one of three winners of the 2024 James Berry Poetry Prize, judged by Major Jackson, Neil Astley, Imtiaz Dharker, Theresa Muñoz and Nathalie Teitler. Launched in 2021, the James Berry Poetry Prize is Britain's first and only poetry prize offering both expert mentoring and book publication by Bloodaxe Books for young or emerging poets of colour.

Clementine Ewokolo Burnley grew up in Victoria, Cameroon, and has lived between Scotland, Italy and Germany for forty years. She was joint winner of the James Berry Poetry Prize in 2024 and her pamphlet Radical Pairings (Ignitionpress, 2023) was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Award. She's received an Edwin Morgan Second Life Award (2020), the RSL Sky award (2021) for creative nonfiction, and a Hawthornden Foundation Residency, in Bologna, Italy. She has brought multi-modal performances of her work to venues including the HAU, Berlin (2018), the Reeperbahn Festival, Hamburg, (2018), the Literary Colloquium Berlin (2019), and Lateral North's The World That Is Shaping Our COAST (2023) in Glasgow. She's a non-fiction editor at Bending Genres and a Lector for the Royal Literary Fund Reading Round (2025) in Edinburgh.