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Mona Arshi's debut poetry collection, Small Hands, won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2015. Her second collection, Dear Big Gods, was published in 2019 and her novel Somebody Loves You in 2021; the latter was shortlisted for the Goldsmith Prize. She has been appointed as Honorary Professor at the University of Liverpool and Fellow in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge, and is also co-editor of an anthology of nature poetry, Nature Matters, which will be published in 2025. Prior to her career in poetry, she worked as a human rights lawyer, often representing refugees and women fleeing domestic violence.
'Delicately lethal; sharp-eyed and tender; Arshi's poems speak with devastating tongues of the truths and injustices that the world would rather we did not hear, in a voice as nuanced and contemporary as it is resonant across time’ * Preti Taneja, author of We That Are Young * 'Some truths are hard to speak and even harder to discern. These rich and varied verses reveal truths that were there all along, uttered by women millennia ago, but waiting for the acuteness of Mona Arshi’s ear and the surety of her voice' * Christia Mercer, Gustave M. Berne Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University * ‘A beautiful, generous and empathetic collection, MOUTH is Mona's best yet: both personal and political, soulful and sensual, it gives such an interesting feeling of searching and remembering the past. Engaging with Classical tropes and both Ancient and contemporary wars, there is a clear sense of events, lessons and dynamics repeating. This is a mature work from a poet at the height of her powers’ * Bidisha, author of Asylum and Exile * Mouth is a book that turns the brain inside out ?– then beats it with a stick until the dust of ancient literature falls away… there is a spectacular wizardry to her [Arshi’s] words * Observer *
