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 daljit nagra interview
 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.The award-winning poet tells it like it is. The most engrossing aspect of the Edinburgh Book Festival is the chance to hear authors read from their work. A nuance in their voice often brings the text to life in a manner that's sometimes difficult to grasp when grabbing a few lines on a bus or train journey, or in the minutes before heading off to cloud-cuckoo land. Nowhere is this more prevalent than with poetry, and to hear Daljit Nagra read from his wonderful first collection, Look We Have Coming To Dover!, must be what it was like to see Laurence Olivier doing Shakespeare on stage. Nagra is the darling of the poetry circuit, and his star has risen by writing verse that highlights what it was like growing up as the child of cornershop owners. He explains that performing was one of the reasons he became a poet, "I was into music and in a rock band, so it just seemed a natural step to have music without the guitars, in a book. And the closest thing I could find to that was poetry. Poetry is music without instruments. Poets make the sound themselves and it's quite exciting in that sense. All I have to do is turn up with a book and I don't need amplifiers and all that mess."  The collection itself was born of frustration. "When I think of English poetry there's not much Indian stuff. When I reach for the so-called canon there are no references to the world that I know. So I thought it was very important to bring Punjabi life to the fore and make references to Indian life wherever possible. Hopefully, I can do this in an effective enough way so that people can get into it and not feel like it's been thrown at them in that highbrow way, or to make them feel like it's their fault that they're ignorant about it."
Kaleem Aftab
Look We Have Coming To Dover! By Daljit Nagra, out now published by Faber.
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