Lemn Sissay

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 14 October 2015

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is Lemn Sissay.

As a poet, writer and playwright, much of his work tells the story of his search for his birth parents. Born to a young Ethiopian woman who wanted him temporarily fostered while she completed her studies, he was with a family until he was 12. He would spend the next five years in a number of children's homes where he began to write. On leaving care at 17, he self-published his first book of poetry while on the dole.

Several poetry collections, plays and programmes for radio and TV followed and his work has taken him around the world. He was the first poet to be commissioned to write for the 2012 London Olympics and his success has also brought him two doctorates and an MBE for services to literature. He is about to be installed as Chancellor of the University of Manchester, an elected post he will hold for the next seven years. He takes writers' workshops for care-leavers and set up Culture World, the first black writers' workshop.

Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.
0:06.0	For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.
0:10.0	For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.
0:17.0	Radio 4. My customer My castaway this week is Lem Cisei, writer, playwright and poet, his skill with language has brought him an MBE,
0:41.0	two doctrines and fans around the world, including Desmond Tutu.
0:45.4	The significance of words revealed themselves early in his life at 17.
0:50.2	He was given two bits of paper and what he read was to change everything.
0:54.0	One was a letter from his birth mother, written the year after he was fostered and pleading for his return.
1:00.0	The second was his birth certificate showing his real name, not the one he'd answered to for the first 17 years of his life. Much of his writing has been born out of his personal odyssey to trace his lost family, make sense of an often
1:15.2	brutalising care system, and curate the fragments of his fractured beginnings, yet those highly
1:21.6	personal themes reach out far beyond his individual experiences
1:26.0	to highlight the universal nature of rejection, loss, dislocation and healing.
1:32.1	In creativity he says I saw light. location and
1:33.3	He says I saw light the place where anger was an expression in the search of love
1:39.1	Where dysfunction is a true reaction to untruth and how many interesting words that are in that quote
1:45.8	Lamsissi.
1:46.8	I want to begin though with the fact that you were the first poet commissioned to write for the
1:51.1	London 2012 Olympics.
1:53.1	What was it you were trying to see?
1:55.8	I had to look at the Olympic site and find a poem.
2:01.0	There's a poem in there somewhere waiting for me. So you have to kind of excavate until you find that seam of gold and there was a matchmaking factory that used to be there it was
2:17.0	run by women they went on strike and I found an article by a woman called Anibescent who took on the struggle of these working class women.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.