Congratulations to everyone selected for the Wander 2025 open call competition! Thank you to everyone who sent in poems and I really hope next year to have this again and to offer this space.
So here are the poems selected:
Alienated by Mustafa Noah
How To Be by Sanjar Qiam
The Dilemma by Hiba Rasheed
Wind Blows Sudden by B3dmah
Caged Bird by Shaza
يحتلك الشيطان (Occupied By The Devil) by Hend Jouda
Produced by Bairbre Flood - www.bairbreflood.org
Funded by The Arts Council of Ireland
Wander is a podcast that gives spaces to poets with lived experience of seeking refuge, migration or exile.
Hend Jouda is a writer from Gaza who’s published several poetry collections in Arabic: ‘Someone Always Leaves’, ‘No Sugar in the City’ and ‘Finger Survived’ and also, earlier this year, a collection in Arabic and French called ‘A Poet In Times Of War’. She's the winner of the Wander open call 2025 with her poem 'Occupied By The Devil'.
Hend was born in Al-Bureij refugee camp in Gaza which has been attacked dozens of times by Israel, including a bombing on May 7th of a school where displaced people were seeking shelter - over 33 Palestinian civilians were murdered. The school was targeted twice.
Whatever you can do to stop this genocide, do it. Free Palestine. Saoirse don Phalaistin.
Produced by Bairbre Flood - all episodes at www.bairbreflood.org
With thanks to the Arts Council of Ireland for their funding support.
Youth project worker, poet, and visual artist, Fionnuala O'Connell has worked for many years to support young people through activities and capacity building.
She reads her poems, ‘I'm Sorry’, ‘Mother Tongue’ and 'Article 6’ (inspired by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child) -
'You can't eat your rights. You can't hold your rights on top of you to keep you warm or shaded from the sun. You can't wrap your rights around you when your parents have died.'
We talk about her mother in Liberia and how she writes about what she sees happening in the world right now.
'You see how things are landing, you can see the other side of things in real time and sometimes I find that kind of a bit difficult to deal with because it brings up issues of justice and equality and equity and poverty.'
And she emphasises the importance of empathy and care in political poetry.
'I think a lot of the time I try to just see the person, see the picture. Picture what's happening in the most simplest form. To connect to what's happening.'
With thanks to the Arts Council of Ireland for funding support.
Produced by Bairbre Flood : @bairbreflood // bairbreflood.org
Poet and youth worker Dean Oke studied Community Development and Social Policy, and has a postgrad in youth work and his poetry reflects this interest in community issues and social justice.
He’s an emerging poet with a strong social conscience and an advocate for youth voices.
We talk about whether there’s enough room for young people’s voices in literary spaces right now, the importance of spaces like the YMCA and Sauti in Cork, and what the future could look like in this regard.
Dean also explains the importance of his faith in his life and in his writing, and reads several of his poems, including ‘26 And Feeling Awkward’ and ‘Hard Times’.
Thank you Dean for being so open and articulate about mental health struggles, I’m sure a lot of people will relate to what you’re saying.
https://www.instagram.com/deanstonyoke/
Thanks to the Arts Council of Ireland for their funding support and thank you for listening!
Produced by @bairbreflood //
Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan is a writer, performer, and arts consultant from India living in Ireland. Her work's been published by Dedalus Press, Lifeboat Press, Little Island, Poetry Ireland, Banshee, and The Stinging Fly amongst others.
She's been the recipient of multiple Arts Council Awards, one of which supported her being the 2023 Writer in Residence for the Institute of Physics. In 2024 she was selected as a Goethe-Institute Studio Quantum Artist in Residence, and is currently under commission with Skein Press as part of the Play It Forward Fellowship.
We talk about her very brief AI experiment with poetry, how her sense of Irishness has developed since we last spoke, her participation in 'Queering The Green' , observations about queer migrant space in literature in Ireland, her recent discovery she's AuDHD + more.
And she reads several of her beautiful poems for us.
You can check her website - https://www.chandrika.ie/ and her instagram: @chandrikanm.art
Wander is produced by Bairbre Flood (@bairbreflood) with thanks to funding from the Arts Council of Ireland.
Amano is a multidisciplinary artist with roots in Ireland and Japan. Her practice includes sean-nós, vocal improvisation and folk storytelling. She’s working to de-colonise the Irish language through music, and writes beautiful, evocative and often politically charged poetry and spoken word.
She reads her poem, 'Underpass 6' and we've a lovely talk about sean-nós singing, the everyday practice of decolonising ourselves, how activism fuels her art, being a culchie from both Ireland and Japan and much more.
The music you hear throughout this programme is all from Thread the gorgeous experimental Irish-language album she created with Kalabanx, and recorded by GMC Beats, in the Kabin Studio.
Follow Amano: @amanoanseo
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Wander is produced by Bairbre Flood with funding from the Arts Council of Ireland // @bairbreflood
In this special Poetry Day episode, Lavie Olupona reads her poems and we talk about being a young writer in Ireland today, setting up the new magazine Blaithi ('Little Flower' in Irish) and how her Nigerian and Traveller ethnicity influences her writing.
Wander, produced by Bairbre Flood, gives space to poets with lived experience of exile and is funded by the Arts Council of Ireland.
Palestinian-American poet, journalist, teacher and activist Noor Hindi's debut poetry collection Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow published by Haymarket Books, was an honorable mention for the Arab American Book Award.
She reads us several poems from this collection - ‘Palestine’, ‘Breaking News’, ‘Swearing Allegiance’. And ‘A Day, A Life: When a Medic Was Killed in Gaza, Was It an Accident?’ for Rouzan al-Najjar after / in defiance of a piece published by the New York Times about al Najjar'.
She’s currently editing a Palestinian poetry anthology Heaven Looks Like Us also published by Haymarket Books - which is due out in May.
We talk about this anthology and her insights into political writing, organising and radical art, the power of stories especially in the Palestinian context, going beyond witness towards action + more.
'I also think the idea of witness is limited in that I think it is the beginning of a process for social justice and community building, not the end...I think that we need to move beyond this idea of witness too. Maybe the first step is awareness of an atrocity and knowing that some violence is happening and sharing it and talking about it, and then the next step is organising around a way to help.' - Noor Hindi
Funded by the Arts Council of Ireland.
Produced by Bairbre Flood.
Welcome back to this new season of Wander. This year we’ve got a fantastic lineup - and for the first time including Traveller poets. For those outside of Ireland, Travellers are the indigenous people of Ireland. They are a distinct ethnic minority with their own culture, language and traditions. In the 1960’s the Irish government brought in a series of laws that tried to destroy their way of life.
My guest today, Helen Hutchinson, was one of the first families to experience this state policy and we talk about this in depth, and how it affects people today.
She’s an incredible woman, with a lifetime of activism and community building - and is a founding member of Pavee Point, a groundbreaking group set up in 1985 which uses a collective community development approach to fight for Traveller & Roma human rights.
‘The system did a job on us,
banned us from traveling and moving on.
It is a caring country, a land we call home.
Wrap the starry flag around me for I am Irish too.’
'The Starry Flag' by Helen Hutchinson
Helen is also a prolific poet - She’s one of Skein Press’ ‘Play It Forward’ Fellows in 2023, author of the poetry collection, ‘From The Dirt Lane to the Open Roads’ and guest editor of the Poetry Ireland Review pamphlet Trumpet (issue 13).
Also, if you know any Traveller or Roma poets please let them know about an open call for Wander. This is also open to poets with lived experience of forced exile or seeking refuge.
It’s a paid opportunity and the submissions are open until the end of April - all the details are up on the website - www.bairbreflood.org/wander-submissions
A massive thanks to The Arts Council of Ireland who’ve funded this again, and to everyone who got in touch with me since the last season, and who’ve shared episodes and given their feedback - thank you!
Racism in Greece, Mahmoud Darwish, normalising pushbacks and genocide, writing as witness, collective liberation, Moody reads his poem ‘Borders’ and Mustafa reads his ‘Kanoon’ (‘ كانون’) - from the Boat Arts Centre again in Kypseli, Athens.
Funded by the Arts Council of Ireland and produced by Bairbre Flood.
Sauti, 'voice for the voiceless' in Swahili, uses art and music to express themselves and to challenge racism in Ireland. They held the second Youth Anti-Racism Summit in Cork City Hall in 2024 and organized ‘Riot Against Racism’ to bring together many different performers and artists to tackle racism.
‘Racism we’re gonna swing it out’ - Diamond
Thanks to the fantastic young people of Sauti Youth who talk to me for this podcast and who share their poetry, spoken word and music with us: Emmanuella, Ebenezer, Zoe, Kanyi, Pablo, Diamond, Toby and Caleb. And to Mark Mavambu and Raphael Olympio, youth mentors and founders of Sauti Studios who also share their insights on activism and working for change.
The poetry featured was created at a special workshop by Raphael Olympio (funded by the Arts Council) and the young people wrote about racism, the genocide in Congo, their hometown of Harare in Zimbabwe, ‘The Sky Is The Limit’, and their love of Nigeria. And we talked about colonialism, neo-colonialism, writing, activism and much more.
‘Although all these countries have these great mineral resources or whatever in their country, it's supposed to be benefiting the country, not causing trouble and chaos in the country. Like this is not only happening to African countries, even in South America too, they have a lot of mineral resources and their country's don’t get advantage of it - it's been happening for years. We all think this stopped by the countries being, having the so called independence, but they might have independence, but the country's not. It's not getting controlled on its own.’
- Ebeneezer
Music recorded at Wander Live Event at Laneway Studios, Cork where Sauti Youth performed 'Change' and 'They Don't Really Care About Us'.
Follow Sauti Youth @sautistudiocork & Cork Migrant Centre @corkmigrantcentre
Produced by @bairbreflood // bairbreflood.org
Thanks to the Arts Council of Ireland for their continued support and funding.
Good Day Cork was created in 2018 with a mission to amplify Cork's unrepresented voices. The first event they held was Many Tongues of Cork in March 2019.
Many Tongues is a multilingual prose and poetry gathering that recognises Cork's intercultural identity. And the aim of the event is to help people understand different cultures by using the sounds of the languages spoken by her people.
Joanna Dukkipati also organises regular salon events, podcasts and arts festivals focusing on the arts and diverse voices, and publishes a zine, also called Good Day Cork once a month.
Olha Matso has performed at poetry readings and spoken word events at the Winding Stair Bookshop and Vicar St. (as part of the Red Cross/Ukrainian Action Ireland event in 2022) and others throughout Ireland.
She’s created poetry videos on her youtube channel and was recently commissioned by artist Varvara Shavrova for a poetry reading at the launching of an installation at the Photo Museum Ireland. Olha is studying performing arts, acting for stage and screen, and she often blends poetry with movement, dance and performance.
The ‘Executed Renaissance’, as Olha explains, was an artistic movement violently repressed by the Stalinist regime. These Ukrainian poets, writers, and artists of the 1920s and early 1930s founded many literary organisations, and created art as they put it: "on the brink of the possible". Hundreds of them were deported, imprisoned or shot.
'Absurdity - and magical realism - it's more realistic than real life. It comes from the real life. People just live their lives in this domestic style, they forget about that magic and poetry. It comes to us to remind that ok, you live in this world, in a real world, but it's a magical world.'
Follow her @olhamatso and watch her poetry videos.
'So I wanted to bring Syria back to life, the Syria that I fell in love with before war. And that's what I wanted to do. That's what I did in the book. Like I talk about food, my grandma's cooking, the music, scenery, the literature, the books, the love scenes, the love chapters where I fall in love with my husband. And I wanted to bring that to life. So in the book, the war is just a small chapter of it, but for me, the most important thing was life before war and after.'
Suad Aldarra is a Syrian-Irish writer and data scientist. She was selected as the Common Currency writer in residence for Cuirt International Festival and has been on panels at many different literary festivals throughout Ireland, including at the Dalkey Book Festival, and most recently in April 2024, at the Cork World Book Festival. Her debut memoir, I Don’t Want to Talk About Home was published by Penguin in 2022, and was shortlisted for the ‘An Post Irish Biography of the Year’ Award.
Follow Suad Aldarra here and here, and her website.
Produced by Bairbre Flood with the support of the Arts Council of Ireland.
Continuing on with the African Youth Artistic Poetry poets from Dzaleka in Malawi, I’m delighted to have Kenny Mujago, Mirielle Abedi, Eagle, and Harry Rama as my guests today.
'A lot of my poems are advocating for Africa and refugees.' - Harry Rama
Kenny Mujago, reads an extract from his story, ‘A Snack From The Corner Street’ about the myriad connections food like chapati creates. Mirielle Abedi reads her poems, 'Wipe My Tears', and 'Woman', Eagle reads his poem 'Tears of Innocence' and Harry Rama recites two of his pieces:
'Ask yourself why? To us poor, never say I am not me, but say I am me with the confidence without fearing anybody. Today is me. After so many years you. Life changing time, not because I'm wearing these clothes. Then you wanna undermine me, then you wanna laugh at me, but you don't know my tomorrow.' - Harry Rama
Funded by the Arts Council of Ireland and produced by Bairbre Flood.
Charles Lipanda Matenga is a poet and activist and founder of AYAP - African Youth Artistic Poetry. His poems have been published in the anthology ‘Our Voices Are Gathering’ in 2023 and ‘Being A Refugee Wasn’t A Choice’ due out later this year.
'Our flag is dying for you have failed to protect your mother Congo. You brought war instead of peace. When will you stop grinding and crushing us? We are spice in the mortar. How long these bloodshed be swimming eternal? We are refugees with no shelters. The rhythm of hymns sang by souls. For the guns, guns, guns have been killing us.'
Ruth Takondwa a poet and advocate for gender equality and refugee rights in Dzaleka refugee camp, She reads 'A Hopeless Girl', 'A Woman In Esther':
'A girl in Esther, she has been useless for so long. Seeing her with a bag on her back, laughing at her, that she's wasting her time for. But see now she's opening evils and poverty doors. She's walking above the ground. Even the wind is afraid to attack. See, she's empowering the girls making word honey for girls.
Now she's very fantastic.'
Firstborn, poet and activist, was selected to be part of the Global Young Influencers group in Malawi. He’s got a unique style, influenced by the Caribbean poet EA Prince, and he reads two pieces, including 'Is It A Case?':
'Africa, save your tomorrow's generation. Build peace in your neighbor's mansion. Escape the white colonization. Save our mother Congo. Today, it's us. Tomorrow might be anyone.'
Produced by Bairbre Flood with the support of the Arts Council of Ireland.
We talk about de-colonialising beauty standards, writing as a lifeline, experiencing the world through the eyes of her daughter, and 'setting a platform where things that we’re uncomfortable with discussing are being discussed'.
Neo Florence Gilson is a poet, writer and storyteller from South Africa. In 2021, she was awarded the Play it Forward Fellowship with Skein Press. Her writing is published in The Stinging Fly, Storm's Journal of Poetry, Prose and Visual Art, The Irish Examiner and Poetry Jukebox Belfast. And she's Artist in Residence with Sample Studios and the Graffiti Theatre Company in Cork.
Follow her: @neogilsonartist
Thanks to the Arts Council of Ireland for their continued support.
Produced by Bairbre Flood (@bairbreflood)
Palestinian poet Marwan Makhoul has published several works of poetry, including 'Hunter of Daffodils', 'Land of the Sad Passiflora', 'Verses The Poems Forgot With Me', 'Where is my Mom?' and 'A Letter From The Last Man'. His poems have won several awards and appeared worldwide in Arabic publications and translated into many languages.
'That poem was written ten years ago. It's exactly the same details. The world just keeps quiet, you know. The war keeps repeating itself.' - Marwan Makhoul on 'Portrait of Gaza'
Marwan was invited to Ireland by poet Annemarie Ní Churreáin (Poetry Ireland and Liam Carson of IMRAM) for the 'Listen To The Birds' series of multilingual events which blended Arabic and English - and Irish versions of his poems by Eibhlis Carcione, Liam De Paor and Aine Ni Fhoghlu. Two of these translations by Eibhlis Carcione are featured in this episode.
Marwan recites 'Portrait of Gaza', 'Verses The Poems Forgot About Me' and 'On The Train To Tel Aviv', and Raphael reads the English translations.
We talk about many things, including why it's so important that artists speak out about what's happening right now, and how to prevent poetry from slipping into sloganeering while also engaging with political issues.
'The artist through the creative process, they give a new image of the personal and the national...Politicians, they put makeup on the truth. Whereas the role of the artist is to wash away that makeup, and actually expose some kind of reality.'
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Wander is an Arts Council of Ireland funded podcast series produced by Bairbre Flood which explores poetry related to migration, human rights and refugee solidarity.
Since October 7th, Israel has killed at least thirteen Palestinian poets and writers in Gaza. One of the most renowned is Saleem Al-Naffar. Throughout his life and career he advocated for peaceful resistance and documented the Palestinian struggle to survive.
Hamas’ actions on October 7th and their refusal to hand over the hostages were despicable actions by a corrupt terrorist organisation. But Hamas’ actions were not carried out by the thousands of men, women and children who’ve been killed since October. Hamas is not these thirteen poets and writers. Hamas is not Saleem Al-Naffar.
Al-Naffar was born in a refugee camp in Gaza, his family having been displaced from Jaffa, and as a child he moved with his family to Jordan and then Syria. He studied Arabic literature at Tishreen University in Syria and in 1994, returned to Gaza, where he published poetry collections, novels, and his autobiography.
His poem Life reads, “Knives might eat / what remains of my ribs, / machines might smash / what remains of stones, / but life is coming, / for that is its way, / creating life even for us.”
On Dec. 7 2023, Al-Naffar and his family were killed in an Israeli airstrike on their home in Gaza City.
This is an extract of his poem, ‘O Lovers’:
'Many corners of our home
are wound with our history.
Time did not exclude us.
Their crazy evil machine
did not smash our hopes.
The perfume of right sleeps in arteries
buried inside us.
Even if our footpaths lengthened
and our tragedies went further than insane,
right will come, slowly.'
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The poet, Heyba Kamal Abu Nada, who wrote the novel Oxygen is Not for the Dead, was killed by an Israeli airstrike in southern Gaza on October 20th.
The poet, novelist, and community activist Omar Abu Shaweesh was killed on October 7th during the shelling of the Nuseirat refugee camp in Gaza.
On October 16, writer Abdullah Al-Aqad was killed, alongside his wife and children, when an Israeli shell struck his house in Khan Younis.
Writer and journalist Mustafa Hassan Mahmoud Al-Sawwaf was killed, alongside several members of his family, when an Israeli shell struck his home on November 18th.
And it just goes on and on. Many of these poets and writers killed along with their families.
The poet and writer Nour al-Din Hajjaj was the author of the play The Gray Ones and the novel Wings That Do Not Fly. This was his final message to the outside world:
‘This is why I am writing now; it might be my last message that makes it out to the free world, flying with the doves of peace to tell them that we love life, or at least what life we have managed to live; in Gaza all paths before us are blocked, and instead we’re just one tweet or breaking news story away from death.
Anyway, I’ll begin.
My name is Nour al-Din Hajjaj, I am a Palestinian writer, I am twenty-seven years old and I have many dreams.
I am not a number and I do not consent to my death being passing news. Say, too, that I love life, happiness, freedom, children’s laughter, the sea, coffee, writing, Fairouz, everything that is joyful—though these things will all disappear in the space of a moment.
One of my dreams is for my books and my writings to travel the world, for my pen to have wings so that no unstamped passport or visa rejection can hold it back.
Another dream of mine is to have a small family, to have a little son who looks like me and to tell him a bedtime story as I rock him in my arms.’
Nour al-Din Hajjaj was killed by an Israeli airstrike on his home in Gaza on December 2nd 2023.
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If you want to support a Palestinian poet who managed to escape with his family - Mosab Abu Toha’s poetry book ‘Things You May Find Hidden In My Ear’.
And writer Mahmoud Jouda needs support for The Right To Narrate Our Stories.
My guests this week: Caleb, Wealth, Angel, Gregory, Daphne, Edwin, Diamond, Nicosha and Promise - some of the inspiring young people Raphael Olympio works as a youth mentor with the Cork Migrant Centre (who featured last episode).
I recorded this a couple of months ago so the Anti-Racism Summit we talk about was going to be on at the end of May, and it’s interesting to hear how they were all preparing for this, and why it’s so important to have an event like this.
Many thanks again to the Arts Council who funded this particular workshop - and to Raphael and Fionnuala O’Connell of the Cork Migrant Centre.
Shout out also to the Haven Cafe, on Bachelors Quay in Cork who provided the space for the young people.
Created with the support of the Arts Council of Ireland.
