A City Waking Up

Susan Wallace-Shaddad, MA French 1974

This pamphlet of thirty poems, ‘A City Waking Up’, published by Dempsey and Windle, was inspired by Sue’s experience of the people, language and customs in the city of Khartoum.

Sue is a Suffolk-born poet living in Ipswich who has visited Sudan regularly since the 1970’s after marrying a Sudanese academic whom she met at the University of St Andrews. Her collection is threaded through with memories of family as well as the flavours of food, celebrations and daily life.

The poet Paul Stephenson has described her collection as ‘A treasure trove of poems that are sensitive and nuanced, drawing on the poet’s own experience of visiting Sudan, richly studded with Arabic vocabulary’.

The cover of the book has a striking photograph of the sun over the river Nile which Sue took on one of her visits there. Sue’s collection ends with poems about the protest movement in Khartoum in early 2019 when political change got underway. https://suewallaceshaddad.wordpress.com

ISBN: 978-1-913-32926-6