

Lemn Sissay, BAFTA nominated writer and one of the world’s most brilliant poets, was taken from his Ethiopian mother at birth against her will and after a stinging rejection from foster parents spent his childhood in care. He published his first book of poetry age 17, selling it to striking miners in Lancashire. Although a large part of him will ‘always feel like that rootless kid’, poetry, he says, gave him wings and he began his travels not just around the world but also the both physical and emotional journey to find his birth family (as beautifully written in his book My Name is Why).
On this episode we cover:
Being conceived in Athens
His Ethiopian mother’s arrival in London in 1966
His father being a pilot for Ethiopian Airlines
The magic and history of Ethiopia
People knowing Ethiopia due to the famine
The first migration a person makes being from the womb into the open air
A social worker taking the baby against his mother’s will
Being fostered by the Greenwood family in Lancashire
Family trips to Scotland to visit his grandparents
Being put into a children’s home at 12
Losing all his family
Spending a lot of his formative years feeling it was his fault
The care system being very punishment orientated
The trauma of being thought of as intrinsically bad
Still finding life beautiful
The unspoken heroes brought up in care now making the world a better place
Poetry being in him from the moment he was born
Knowing he would become a poet age 12
Selling poetry to striking miners in Lancashire age 17
Poetry putting him on planes, enabling him to travel
The transformative experience of his first trip abroad (to Germany to perform)
German cakes and breakfasts
Lisa fighting the corner for British cakes
Cakeology (!) and the resurgence of interest in British cakes
The cakes of Germany being like miniature palaces
(There is a lot of conversation about cake)
Regretting not learning a language
Coronavirus meaning he’s missed Dubai, Ethiopia, India, the USA and Australia
Being very defined in what he wanted in life – to find his mother and to be a poet
Poetry paying for his physical journey to find his family
Finding his mother when he was 21, after a long search
His mother working for the UN in the Gambia
Her fleeing of Ethiopia in 1974
Flying to Africa for the first time to meet his mother
Sending cash for his flight in an envelope from Lancashire to Brixton!
The Senegalese man obsessed with Chris Rhea’s Lady in Red
How travel puts you out of your comfort zone
Communication without language means you have to lose your fear
The fun and trick to bartering
The vulnerability of not knowing the rules
People on the plane from Senegal to Gambia who worked with his mum
Golden wings of dust driving through the Gambian sunset
The moment he met his mother
How travel makes its way into our language; making life journeys, navigating our problems, finding pathways, taking flight
How the relationship with his birth family has developed
Ethiopian Airlines being part of his DNA
The aviation industry in the 1960s being like a village
Lisa going to Addis Ababa to interview Ethiopian model Liya Kebede
And New York to interview chef Marcus Samuelsson and author Maaza Mengiste
Lisa meeting her Fiji-Indian family for the first time
Looking at his mother’s, brothers’ and sisters’ faces for the first time
How we can define ourselves as people of the world
People will only call themselves by a colour when they’re in the minority
The incredible photo of his pilot father with the Emperor’s lion
His father’s death in a plane crash in storm on New Year’s Day
Taking a BBC film crew to the Simian mountains where the crash happened
Finding pieces of plane and fuselage
Finding the place where his father died being like the beginning of the rest of his life
Loving the Hilton in Addis Ababa where his father partied and his mother got married
Staying next to Nick Cave in the Amadari Hotel in Bali
Bathing underneath the Balinese stars
What Nick Cave is like on holiday
The Emirates Literary Festival
Feeling at peace in the Scottish Highlands
Loving New York and Penang in Malaysia –
How the food is always a reflection of the people
How you can have the greatest journeys in your own village
Wanting to give the gift of travel to kids in care
Travel broadens the mind, but the new experience broadens the mind
Migration, travelling, immigrants…all what it takes to be human