Songs We Learn from Trees

Chris Beckett was born in London, but grew up in Ethiopia where his father worked in the British Embassy. He received a first class degree in modern languages from Oxford University. His poems have been widely published in magazines, and he won first prize in the Poetry London competition 2001. He has also translated Amharic poems by well-known contemporary Ethiopian poets such as Fekade Azeze and Bewketu Seyoum ("Modern Poetry in Translation", 2008 and 2012; and a pamphlet, "In Search of Fat" ("Flipped Eye", 2012). He is currently working on translations of later poems by Aime Cesaire, the great French Martinican author of Cahier d’un retour au pays natal.

Alemu Tebeje is an British Ethiopian journalist, poet and campaigner who left Ethiopia in the early 1990s and now lives in London. His first collection of poems, "Greetings to the People of Europe", was published by Tamrat Books in 2018.