Wander

Congratulations to everyone selected for the Wander 2025 open call competition! Thank you to everyone who sent in poems  and I really hope next year to have this again and to offer this space.

So here are the poems selected:

Alienated by Mustafa Noah

How To Be by Sanjar Qiam

The Dilemma by Hiba Rasheed

Wind Blows Sudden by B3dmah 

Caged Bird by Shaza

يحتلك الشيطان (Occupied By The Devil) by Hend Jouda

Produced by Bairbre Flood - www.bairbreflood.org

Funded by The Arts Council of Ireland

Wander is a podcast that gives spaces to poets with lived experience of seeking refuge, migration or exile.

Hend Jouda is a writer from Gaza who’s published several poetry collections in Arabic: ‘Someone Always Leaves’, ‘No Sugar in the City’ and ‘Finger Survived’ and also, earlier this year, a collection in Arabic and French called ‘A Poet In Times Of War’. She's the winner of the Wander open call 2025 with her poem 'Occupied By The Devil'.

Hend was born in Al-Bureij refugee camp in Gaza which has been attacked dozens of times by Israel, including a bombing on May 7th of a school where displaced people were seeking shelter -  over 33 Palestinian civilians were murdered. The school was targeted twice.

Whatever you can do to stop this genocide, do it. Free Palestine. Saoirse don Phalaistin.

Produced by Bairbre Flood - all episodes at www.bairbreflood.org

With thanks to the Arts Council of Ireland for their funding support.

Youth project worker, poet, and visual artist, Fionnuala O'Connell has worked for many years to support young people through activities and capacity building.

She reads her poems, ‘I'm Sorry’, ‘Mother Tongue’ and 'Article 6’ (inspired by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child) -

'You can't eat your rights. You can't hold your rights on top of you to keep you warm or shaded from the sun. You can't wrap your rights around you when your parents have died.'

We talk about her mother in Liberia and how she writes about what she sees happening in the world right now.

'You see how things are landing, you can see the other side of things in real time and sometimes I find that kind of a bit difficult to deal with because it brings up issues of justice and equality and equity and poverty.'

And she emphasises the importance of empathy and care in political poetry.

'I think a lot of the time I try to just see the person, see the picture. Picture what's happening in the most simplest form. To connect to what's happening.'

With thanks to the⁠ ⁠Arts Council of Ireland⁠⁠ for funding support.
Produced by Bairbre Flood : ⁠@bairbreflood⁠ // ⁠⁠bairbreflood.org⁠⁠

Poet and youth worker Dean Oke studied Community Development and Social Policy, and has a postgrad in youth work and his poetry reflects this interest in community issues and social justice. 

He’s an emerging poet with a strong social conscience and an advocate for youth voices. 

We talk about whether there’s enough room for young people’s voices in literary spaces right now, the importance of spaces like the YMCA and Sauti in Cork, and what the future could look like in this regard. 

Dean also explains the importance of his faith in his life and in his writing, and reads several of his poems, including  ‘26 And Feeling Awkward’ and ‘Hard Times’. 

Thank you Dean for being so open and articulate about mental health struggles, I’m sure a lot of people will relate to what you’re saying. 

https://www.instagram.com/deanstonyoke/

Thanks to the Arts Council of Ireland for their funding support and thank you for listening!

Produced by @bairbreflood //

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan is a writer, performer, and arts consultant from India living in Ireland. Her work's been published by Dedalus Press, Lifeboat Press, Little Island, Poetry Ireland, Banshee, and The Stinging Fly amongst others. 

She's been the recipient of multiple Arts Council Awards, one of which supported her being the 2023 Writer in Residence for the Institute of Physics. In 2024 she was selected as a Goethe-Institute Studio Quantum Artist in Residence, and is currently under commission with Skein Press as part of the Play It Forward Fellowship. 

We talk about her very brief AI experiment with poetry, how her sense of Irishness has developed since we last spoke, her participation in 'Queering The Green' , observations about queer migrant space in literature in Ireland, her recent discovery she's AuDHD + more.

And she reads several of her beautiful poems for us.

You can check her website - https://www.chandrika.ie/ and her instagram: @chandrikanm.art 

• Queering The Green, edited by Paul Maddern, and published by Lifeboat Press.
• ‘Mapping the Depths of Us: a pamphlet of physics poems’ by Chandrika - which you can download for free. 
• The anthology of essays by autistic Irish writers that Chandrika also wrote for - Wired Our Own Way published by New Island Press. 

Wander is produced by Bairbre Flood (@bairbreflood) with thanks to funding from the Arts Council of Ireland.

Amano is a multidisciplinary artist with roots in Ireland and Japan. Her practice includes sean-nós, vocal improvisation and folk storytelling. She’s working to de-colonise the Irish language through music, and writes beautiful, evocative and often politically charged poetry and spoken word.

She reads her poem, 'Underpass 6' and we've a lovely talk about sean-nós singing, the everyday practice of decolonising ourselves, how activism fuels her art, being a culchie from both Ireland and Japan and much more.

The music you hear throughout this programme is all from Thread the gorgeous experimental Irish-language album she created with Kalabanx, and recorded by GMC Beats, in the Kabin Studio.

Follow Amano: @amanoanseo

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Wander is produced by Bairbre Flood with funding from the Arts Council of Ireland // @bairbreflood

In this special Poetry Day episode, Lavie Olupona reads her poems and we talk about being a young writer in Ireland today, setting up the new magazine Blaithi ('Little Flower' in Irish) and how her Nigerian and Traveller ethnicity influences her writing. 

Wander, produced by Bairbre Flood, gives space to poets with lived experience of exile and is funded by the Arts Council of Ireland.

www.bairbreflood.org

Palestinian-American poet, journalist, teacher and activist Noor Hindi's debut poetry collection Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow published by Haymarket Books, was an honorable mention for the Arab American Book Award. 

She reads us several  poems from this collection  - ‘Palestine’, ‘Breaking News’, ‘Swearing Allegiance’. And ‘A Day, A Life: When a Medic Was Killed in Gaza, Was It an Accident?’ for Rouzan al-Najjar after / in defiance of a piece published by the New York Times about al Najjar'. 

She’s currently editing a Palestinian poetry anthology Heaven Looks Like Us also published by Haymarket Books - which is due out in May. 

We talk about this anthology and her insights into political writing, organising and radical art, the power of stories especially in the Palestinian context, going beyond witness towards action + more.

'I also think the idea of witness is limited in that I think it is the beginning of a process for social justice and community building, not the end...I think that we need to move beyond this idea of witness too. Maybe the first step is awareness of an atrocity and knowing that some violence is happening and sharing it and talking about it, and then the next step is organising around a way to help.' - Noor Hindi

Funded by the Arts Council of Ireland.

Produced by Bairbre Flood.

Welcome back to this new season of Wander. This year we’ve got a fantastic lineup - and for the first time including Traveller poets. For those outside of Ireland, Travellers are the indigenous people of Ireland. They are a distinct ethnic minority with their own culture, language and traditions. In the 1960’s the Irish government brought in a series of laws that tried to destroy their way of life.

My guest today, Helen Hutchinson, was one of the first families to experience this state policy and we talk about this in depth, and how it affects people today. 

She’s an incredible woman, with a lifetime of activism and community building - and is a founding member of Pavee Point, a groundbreaking group set up in 1985 which uses a collective community development approach to fight for Traveller & Roma human rights.

‘The system did a job on us,

banned us from traveling and moving on.

It is a caring country, a land we call home.

Wrap the starry flag around me for I am Irish too.’

• 'The Starry Flag' by Helen Hutchinson

Helen is also a prolific poet - She’s one of Skein Press’ ‘Play It Forward’ Fellows in 2023, author of the poetry collection,⁠ ‘From The Dirt Lane to the Open Roads’⁠ and guest editor of the Poetry Ireland Review pamphlet ⁠Trumpet⁠ (issue 13).

Also, if you know any Traveller or Roma poets please let them know about an open call for Wander. This is also open to poets with lived experience of forced exile or seeking refuge. 

It’s a paid opportunity and the submissions are open until the end of April - all the details are up on the website - ⁠www.bairbreflood.org/wander-submissions ⁠

A massive thanks to The Arts Council of Ireland who’ve funded this again, and to everyone who got in touch with me since the last season, and who’ve shared episodes and given their feedback - thank you!

Welcome back to this new season of Wander. This year we’ve got a fantastic lineup - and for the first time including Traveller poets. For those outside of Ireland, Travellers are the indigenous people of Ireland. They are a distinct ethnic minority with their own culture, language and traditions. In the 1960’s the Irish government brought in a series of laws that tried to destroy their way of life.

My guest today, Helen Hutchinson, was one of the first families to experience this state policy and we talk about this in depth, and how it affects people today. 

She’s an incredible woman, with a lifetime of activism and community building - and is a founding member of Pavee Point, a groundbreaking group set up in 1985 which uses a collective community development approach to fight for Traveller & Roma human rights.

‘The system did a job on us,

banned us from traveling and moving on.

It is a caring country, a land we call home.

Wrap the starry flag around me for I am Irish too.’

• 'The Starry Flag' by Helen Hutchinson

Helen is also a prolific poet - She’s one of Skein Press’ ‘Play It Forward’ Fellows in 2023, author of the poetry collection, ‘From The Dirt Lane to the Open Roads’ and guest editor of the Poetry Ireland Review pamphlet Trumpet (issue 13).

Also, if you know any Traveller or Roma poets please let them know about an open call for Wander. This is also open to poets with lived experience of forced exile or seeking refuge. 

It’s a paid opportunity and the submissions are open until the end of April - all the details are up on the website - www.bairbreflood.org/wander-submissions

A massive thanks to The Arts Council of Ireland who’ve funded this again, and to everyone who got in touch with me since the last season, and who’ve shared episodes and given their feedback - thank you!