Pelican Daughter

The poetry of Nadine El-Enany has something of the primal power of the Mariner: you are grasped by the arm on a familiar street: you hadn’t seen anyone coming, you were getting through the day – now you’re alone with a clarity fierce and far-seeing, an austere compassion, a consoling light. Pelican Daughter carries the pulses of life, but sounds the charged spaces between them too. A brief poem about heartbreak seems to turn to a poem of distant war, then suddenly bombs are falling in earshot, new love is just around the corner, and a new life – the only hope if there’s only one – rises through the book like the dawning sun. The poems feel both timeless and time-stamped. This is poetry of the conscience, Thomas Hardy’s ‘full look at the Worst’, but it neither preaches nor berates, it simply guides the reader – often in remarkably few lines – to a place down the street where love seems reparable and peace might come. El-Enany’s is as compelling a new voice as one could hope to hear.

Nadine El-Enany was joint winner of the James Berry Poetry Prize in 2024, when she also won the Newcastle University Chancellor’s Poetry Prize. Her first collection of poems, Pelican Daughter, is published by Bloodaxe Books in 2026. Her poems have appeared in Butcher’s Dog, Poetry Wales, And Other Poems, and Under the Radar.

She is Professor of Law at Kent Law School, having previously been Reader in Law at Birkbeck College, where she was Co-Director of the Centre for Research on Race and Law, and a Lecturer in Law at Brunel University. She is the author of (B)ordering Britain: Law, race and empire (Manchester University Press, 2020), co-author of Empire’s Endgame: Racism and the British State (Pluto Press, 2021), and co-editor of After Grenfell: Violence, Resistance and Response (Pluto Press, 2019). She lives in London.

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