Let us introduce you to…

Inua Ellams

When asked why he began to write poetry Inua explained that there were many reasons:

“But the first one was that a friend of mine who I grew up with committed suicide in Dublin and I started writing after he died because I wanted to still enjoy literature. Literature was what a lot of our friendship was based on. That and arguments and the language of debating which we had together, drove me to write to continue with that.

The other was that I was broke. I wanted to be a visual artist and I couldn’t afford to buy paint and I figured that I could paint pictures with words, and that’s why I write very descriptively.

Another was that it was the cheapest and most direct way to articulate myself to myself and an audience who would listen and acknowledge that I existed and could contribute to a community that I belonged to even though I had no right to belong to it. By that I mean, I began writing when I was an immigrant and I spent the first few years of my career expecting to be deported at any one time. I was invisible, I couldn’t work and poetry was a way to reach out to people in a non-commercial way. Also it enabled me to be in places where my background and my anonymity could still be secured, and I could still be commanding as a young, black man.”

He describes poetry as being a lifeline. Trite, until you realise that, even when onstage at the National Theatre, he was technically an illegal immigrant, battling through the legal system by day for the right to stay. He was an illegal immigrant even when he got an invite to Buckingham Palace for a drinks reception. Art - and its community - provided a home.

Born in Nigeria in 1984, Inua Ellams now tours across the world as a poet, playwright, performer, graphic artist and designer. He has been commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company, National Theatre, Tate Modern, Louis Vuitton, Chris Ofili, BBC Radio & Television. His first three books of poetry ‘Thirteen Fairy Negro Tales’ and ‘Candy Coated Unicorn and Converse’ are available from Flipped Eye and Akashic Books. Several plays including the critically acclaimed Black T-shirt Collection and award-winning The 14th Tale are available from Oberon. In 2005, he founded the Midnight Run— an arts-filled, night-time, playful, walking, urban movement that attempts to reconnect inner city lives with inner city spaces.

Across his work, Identity, Displacement & Destiny are reoccurring themes. Having escaped the Islamic extremist group Boko Haram, he knows something of the migrant experience, but says that the nightmarish journeys of refugees is still something he can hardly fathom. In Dolphins, he transforms the stories of children who have fled their homelands into poetry, imbuing the horror with a humanity that is compassionate but clear-eyed.