Warsan Shire’s debut collection 'Bless The Daughter Raised By A Voice In Her Head' was published by Penguin Random House in 2022.  Her first pamphlet, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth was published by flipped eye publishing in 2011.  She won the Inaugural Brunel University African Poetry Prize in 2013 and in 2014 she was appointed as the first Young Poet Laureate for London.  She was also selected as Poet in Residence for Queensland, Australia where she collaborated with the Aboriginal Centre for Performing Arts. In 2015 she released a limited edition pamphlet Her Blue Body. In 2016 and 2020 she collaborated with Beyoncé Knowles-Carter on the film adaptation and poetry for the visual album Lemonade and Black Is King.  In 2017 she was included as part of the Penguin Modern Poets series alongside Sharon Olds and Malika Booker.  She also wrote the short film Brave Girl Rising highlighting the voices and faces of Somali girls in Africa's largest refugee camp.  Her work has been translated and published in dozens of territories around the world. 

“It is not overstatement to say Shire writes the way Nina Simone sang. All the brilliance of her lean, monumental Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth is magnified in this remarkable new book.”—Terrance Hayes, author of American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin

“Warsan Shire’s exquisite, memorable, and finely tuned poems articulate a depth of experience that never fails to surprise and profoundly move me, as she so powerfully gives voice to the unspoken.”—Bernardine Evaristo, author of Girl, Woman, Other