Lemn Sissay
Lemn Sissay MBE[1] (born 21 May 1967) is an English author and broadcaster. Sissay was the official poet of the 2012 London Olympics, has been chancellor of the University of Manchester since 2015, and joined the Foundling Museum's board of trustees two years later, having previously been appointed one of the museum's fellows. He was awarded the 2019 PEN Pinter Prize. He has written a number of books and plays.
Sissay's mother arrived in England from Ethiopia in 1966. Pregnant at the time, she was sent from Bracknell to a home for unwed mothers in Lancashire to give birth. Sissay was born in Billinge Hospital, near Wigan, Lancashire, in 1967. Norman Goldthorpe, a social worker assigned to his mother by Wigan Social Services, found foster parents for Sissay while his mother returned to Bracknell to finish her studies.
Goldthorpe named Sissay "Norman" and gave him to foster parents, telling them to treat it as an adoption. The events are depicted in the play Something Dark and in BBC documentary Internal Flight. His strongly religious foster parents wanted to name him Mark after the Christian evangelist Mark and give him their surname, Greenwood.
When Sissay was 12 years old, after his foster parents had had three children of their own, they placed him into a children's home and said neither they nor any of their family would contact him again.
Poem by Sissay on Hardy's Well, Manchester
Between the ages of 12 and 17, Sissay was held in a total of four children's homes. With no surrogate family or birth family, upon leaving the care system he was given his birth certificate, showing the name of his mother, Yemarshet Sissay, and his own legal name, Lemn Sissay. He was also given a letter from his files dated 1968, written by his mother to Norman Goldthorpe, pleading for his return. She wrote: "How can I get Lemn back? I want him to be with his own people, his own colour. I don't want him to face discrimination." From the point of leaving care, he began the search for his mother and took back his real name.
At the age of 17, Sissay used his unemployment benefit money to self-publish his first poetry pamphlet, Perceptions of the Pen, which he sold to striking miners in Lancashire. When he was 18 years old he moved from Atherton to the city of Manchester. At 19 he was a literature development worker at Commonword, a community publishing cooperative in Manchester.
Sissay met his birth mother when he was 21, after a long search. She was working for the UN in the Gambia
ليست هناك تعليقات:
إرسال تعليق