Warsan Shire
Quick answer: Warsan Shire craft guide: inherited voices, migration imagery and viral intimacy, from Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth to Bless the Daughter.
Warsan Shire (born 1988) became one of the most quoted poets alive before publishing a full-length book. Born in Nairobi to Somali parents and raised in London, she released the chapbook Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth in 2011, won the inaugural Brunel International African Poetry Prize in 2013, and was named London's first Young Poet Laureate in 2014. Her lines about refugees, especially the image of home as a predator's mouth that no one flees without reason, travelled the world during the migration crises of the 2010s.
Then Beyoncé wove her poems through the 2016 film Lemonade, and Shire reached an audience poetry rarely touches. Her craft, though, is older than her fame: the Somali tradition of poetry as community memory, carried into a London bedroom.
A poet of inherited stories
Shire has described herself as writing down the stories of her family and community, particularly its women: aunts, mothers, cousins, refugees and brides whose experiences cross her poems as speaking voices. Somali culture is famously a nation of poets, and her work translates that oral inheritance into intimate free verse rather than performance declamation.
Her full collection, Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head (2022), gathers and extends the earlier work, following a girl called by the Somali endearment used for her, through girlhood, displacement, faith and healing. The chapbook Her Blue Body and the Brunel prize portfolio complete the small, potent shelf.
The signature moves
Shire's poems feel confided rather than composed, which is itself the craft. Look closer and the techniques show.
What you can learn
Interview your family, literally or in memory, and write a poem in a relative's voice about an event you never witnessed. Shire shows that the poet can be a medium as much as a confessor, and that other people's stories, handled with love and care, enlarge a small body of work into a communal one.
Study how she earns virality without slogans: her most-shared lines are images, not opinions. Turn your convictions into pictures a stranger can feel in the body. Writory's judges score emotion and imagery month after month, and Shire's method, testimony carried in concrete images, is close to a formula for both.
Where to start reading
Begin with Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth, then the full collection Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head. Watch Lemonade to see her words in collaboration, and find her widely anthologised poem about home and flight, one of the defining poems of the refugee decade.
What poets can take from this
- Write a poem in the voice of a relative about an event that happened before you were born.
- Introduce speakers by relationship, aunt, grandmother, neighbour, instead of by name.
- Let one domestic object or room turn uncanny to carry what realism cannot say.
- Address a poem to a younger version of yourself as warning, blessing or instruction.
- Convert one political conviction into a single physical image before you draft anything else.
Try it yourself
Write a poem titled with a term of endearment used in your family. In it, three women from different generations each speak once about leaving, or refusing to leave, a place. Give each voice one object and one scent, and let the youngest speaker answer the eldest.
Questions
What is Warsan Shire famous for?
She is known for poems of Somali diaspora experience, especially her widely shared poem about home and flight, for the chapbook Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth, and for her poetry featured throughout Beyoncé's 2016 film Lemonade.
What has Warsan Shire published?
Her works include the chapbooks Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth (2011) and Her Blue Body, and the full-length collection Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head (2022). She won the inaugural Brunel International African Poetry Prize in 2013.
Why is Warsan Shire's poem about home so widely quoted?
It compresses the logic of flight into physical images, arguing that no one abandons home unless staying has become more dangerous than any journey. During the refugee crises of the 2010s it was shared, read at rallies and cited far beyond poetry circles.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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