Routes

At the core of this debut collection is a question - what is worth holding onto? Through poetic experiments that blend the academic and the artistic, Rhiya Pau queries complex characters and tender landscapes. Routes journeys from Ba's kitchen in Sonia Gardens to Independence hour in Delhi, across the pink shores of Nakuru, to meet a painter on Lee High Road. Celebrating fifty years since her community arrived in the UK, Pau chronicles the migratory histories of her ancestors and simultaneously lays bare the conflicts of identity that arise from being a member of the East African-Indian diaspora. In this multilingual discourse exhibiting vast formal range, Pau wrestles with language, narrative and memory, daring to navigate their collective fallibilities to architect her own identity. '[Routes]...holds up to the light the wisdom of the past, and asks what else is passed down along with it...a work of humane intelligence, formal experiment and linguistic verve' - Sarah Howe, Judge of Eric Gregory Awards 2022

Rhiya Pau is a British-born poet of Indian heritage from a community with a rich history of migration. She is one half of Origins Poetry Duo, who host multi-disciplinary fundraisers, platforming emerging artists of the global majority and is a member of the Poets for Partition collective. Rhiya was the winner of the 2021 Creative Future Writers' Award. Her debut poetry collection, Routes, won an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 2022.