Alycia Pirmohamed is a Canadian born poet and educator who now lives in Scotland. Her family immigrated to Canada from Tanzania. Pirmohamed holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and a PhD from the University of Edinburgh. Her dissertation is entitled The Ghosts That Visit Us As We Dream and Figurative Homelands: Second-generation Immigrant Experiences in North American Contemporary Poetry. Pirmohamed teaches creative writing to graduate students at Cambridge University. Her collection of essays entitled Shorelines will be published in 2026 and won the 2023 Nan Shepherd Prize.
Poetry
Another Way to Split Water
Portland, OR: YesYes Books, 2022.
Edinburgh: Polygon/Birlinn Ltd., 2022.
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
In Alycia Pirmohamed’s debut collection, Another Way to Split Water, a woman’s body expands and contracts across the page, fog uncoils at the fringes of a forest, and water in all its forms cascades into metaphors of longing and separation just as often as it signals inheritance, revival, and recuperation. Language unfolds into unforgettable and arresting imagery, offering a map toward self-understanding that is deeply rooted in place: the prairies and mountains of Alberta, Canada, the hills and gardens of Edinburgh, Scotland, and the coastlines of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. These poems are a lyrical exploration of how ancestral memory reforms and transforms throughout generations, through stories told and retold, imagined and reimagined. It is a meditation on womanhood, belonging, faith, intimacy, and the natural world.
Awards and Honours
2023 Raymond Souster Award (Finalist)
Links
Alycia Pirmohamed personal website
Publisher YesYes Books
Publisher Polygon an imprint of Birlinn Ltd.