Warsan Shire

Warsan Shire is a British writer, poet, editor, and teacher who was born to Somali parents in Kenya. In 2013 she was awarded the inaugural Brunel University African Poetry Prize, chosen from a shortlist of six candidates out of a total of 655 entries. Her words "No one leaves home unless/home is the mouth of a shark" from the poem "Conversations about Home (at a deportation center)" have been called "a rallying call for refugees and their advocates."

Born on 1 August 1988 in Kenya to Somali parents, Shire migrated with her family to the United Kingdom at age one. She has four siblings. She has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Creative Writing. As of 2015, she primarily resides in Los Angeles, California. In 2011, she released Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth, a poetry pamphlet published by flipped eye. Her full collection was released in 2016, also through the flipped eye.

Shire has read her poetry in various art venues throughout the world, including in the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany, North America, South Africa, and Kenya. Her poems have been published in various literary publications, including Poetry Review, Magma, and Wasafiri. Additionally, Shire's verse has been featured in the collections Salt Book of Younger Poets (Salt, 2011), Ten: The New Wave (Bloodaxe, 2014), and New Daughters of Africa (edited by Margaret Busby, 2019). Her poetry has also been translated into a number of languages, including Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Danish, and Estonian.

As of 2016, Shire is working on her first full-length poetry collection, having put out a limited-release pamphlet called Her Blue Body in 2015. She serves as the poetry editor at SPOOK magazine and teaches global and online poetry workshops for cathartic and aesthetic purposes. Shire's poetry featured prominently in Beyoncé's 2016 feature-length film Lemonade. Knowles-Carter's interest in using Shire's work was sparked with Shire's piece "For Women Who Are Difficult to Love."

Shire published Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head: Poems on March 1, 2022. It was reviewed in The New Yorker Shire was interviewed on NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday by Sarah McCammon on February 27, 2022, to discuss her new book. Shire uses her own personal experiences and the experiences of people to whom she is close. 

She is quoted as saying: "I either know, or I am, every person I have written about, for or as. But I do imagine them in their most intimate settings."Her main interest is writing about and for people who are generally not heard otherwise, e.g., immigrants and refugees, as well as other marginalized groups of people. 

Shire is also quoted as saying: "I also navigate a lot through memory, my memories, and other people's memories, trying to essentially just make sense of stuff." As a first-generation immigrant, she has used her poetry to connect with her home country of Somalia, which she has never been to but which she describes as "a nation of poets." She uses her position as an immigrant to convey these people's lives. Shire utilizes the influences of her close relatives and family members and their experiences to depict the struggles they have all faced in her poetry.