Joint winner of the James Berry Poetry Prize 2024. The poems of Nadine El-Enany’s debut collection Pelican Daughter are imbued with tenderness and fuelled by a hunger for justice, connection and a more empathic world. With stunning lyricism she fiercely probes the pain of being powerless in the face of global catastrophes – genocide, climate crisis – without tilting into despair. These poems do not divide the personal and political – indeed, boundaries are met with love and defiance, even when they appear immutable. The voice that permeates is as inviting as it is brave, through the book’s expansive terrain, from the “hopscotch puddles” of childhood to peace marches that do ‘something/to time and space, like we’re here together / but we’re also there’, to a militarised border where people pass ‘prickly pears / over razor wire, sacks of apples and bread’. El-Enany ushers our attention to the vulnerable and the small, the ‘wail of forgotten things’, waking us to what we cannot hear, the ‘woodlice walking / and spiders making silk’. Hers is a poetry of clarity, compassion and enduring love for the world.

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For El-Enany, the poem is an attempt to distil a thought or feeling, a sensory or affective response in Auden’s legacy. It is a way to neatly capture a look, a passing sting, and the complicated feelings emerging from the task of parenthood. [...] El-Enany’s Pelican Daughter is a lyrical meditation on planetary catastrophe and a new life born in among the annihilation of people across the world. She moves us beyond the passivity of witness, articulating a grief that works on the body and soul in tandem, driven by a comprehensible fury at the violations of life that capitalism enables.