Winner of the 2023 Ockham NZ Book Awards: Best First Book Awards – Jessie Mackay Prize for Poetry  

“These vivid, urgent poems stayed with me. Each poem is its own world of taste and colour: rainwater, moss, wind, a confluence of languages that mirrors the flow of rivers. Khadro Mohamed is an exciting new voice in the poetry of Aotearoa.” —Nina Mingya Powles “Through her epic storytelling, Khadro unpicks the many layers of the refugee experience. This is a brilliant and insightful poetic journey.” —Abbas Nazari “Khadro has taken loneliness and cloaked it in images - fireflies in mason jars, foamy goat’s milk, pāua shell and pōhutukawa, her mother's braids. She has cloaked it to brave weather: storms and bright hot sun. She has cloaked it to brave hate and malignant fear, she has cloaked it in languages, the beauty of languages, and has let this loneliness walk from Egypt to Aotearoa and back again. She has taken loneliness and made something vibrant.” —Becky Manawatu

Khadro Mohamed is a 24 year old writer and poet residing on the shores of Te Whanganui-a-Tara. She’s originally from Somalia and has a deep connection with her whakapapa, which is often a huge source of inspiration for her poetry. You can find bits of her writing floating around Newtown in Food Court Books and in online magazines such as: Starling, Salient Magazine, Pantograph Punch, The Spinoff and more.