Songs We Learn from Trees: An Anthology of Ethiopian Amharic Poetry

About

Chris Beckett was born in London but grew up in Ethiopia. His second collection of poems Ethiopia Boy was published by Carcanet/Oxford Poets in 2013. Sketches from the Poem Road a collaboration with Japanese artist Isao Miura was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award 2015. His translations (with Alemu Tebeje and others) have been published in Modern Poetry in Translation PN Review The Missing Slate and Asymptote Journal. With Gale Burns he co-hosts The Shuffle reading series in Covent Garden. He is a trustee of the Anglo-Ethiopian Society and the Poetry Society. Alemu Tebeje is an Ethiopian journalist poet lyric writer and human rights campaigner who left Ethiopia in the early 1990s and now lives next to Grenfell Tower in London. He runs the website www.debteraw.com and his poems have been published in Amharic Chinese and English as well as being projected on buildings in Denmark Italy USA and UK by US artist Jenny Holzer. His first bilingual collection of poems Greetings to the People of Europe was published by Tamrat Books in 2018 and includes the script of a sketch commissioned by BBC Radio 4 for a migrant re-imagining of Homer's Odyssey My Name is Nobody.