Sujata Bhatt was born in 1956 in Ahmedabad , India , where her mother-tongue was Gujarati. While she was a young child, her family spent three years in New Orleans , where she first learned English. In 1968 her family moved permanently to America , where she attended high school and university. While studying Creative Writing at the University of Iowa , she met her German husband, with whom she moved to Bremen , in northern Germany , in 1987.

'I have always thought of myself as an Indian who is outside India . I would find it difficult to say I'm not Indian because for me that would mean disowning my parents - that's the deepest layer of my identity. Then I think identity can change according to where you live, and I think of myself as having attachments to several cultures, so in that sense several identities -1 don't think identity is something static.'

Although Sujata Bhatt writes mainly in English, her poems often involve a merging of languages. Her first book, Brunizem (the name of a prairie soil found in Asia, Europe and North America), was published in England in 1988. 'Search for My Tongue' is actually a long poem in three parts: the text published in the AQA anthology is an extract. Lines 31-38 are a translation of Lines 17-30.

'I wrote 'Search for my Tongue' when I was twenty-two and it explores feelings that I had that were very strong at that time. I wrote it when I was in Baltimore, in the USA, and at that time I was reading a lot of Gujarati and also English, and sometimes I would be thinking in two languages, and this poem grew out of that.'

Tom Leonard was born in Glasgow in 1944, where he has continued to live ever since. He has described his childhood upbringing as 'working class West of Scodand Irish Catholic' (his father was from Dublin ). He worked as an employment clerk and shop assistant for some years before entering Glasgow University . His fkst publication was 'Six Glasgow Poems', written while at university in 1967. His collection of twenty years' work, Intimate Voices, shared the Saltke Scottish Book of the Year Award in 1984.

Although his passport identifies him as a British citizen, Tom Leonard's sense of his own cultural identity is thoroughly Scottish. Almost all Leonard's poetry is written in his own Glasgow dialect. Hs aim has always been to make poetry using 'my own ordinary working-class West of Scotland speech, that is still poetry'.

'My focus on 'the voice' in my work,' Leonard has written, 'had two by-products over the years: an involvement in performance 'sound poetry', and an increasingly explicit awareness of the political nature of voice in British culture.'

'Unrelated Incidents' is a set of six poems, each of which looks at some aspect of the way we use language. It was written in 1976.

John Agard was born in 1949 in Guyana (then British Guyana), on the South American mainland of the Caribbean . He moved to Britain in 1977, and lives in Sussex , with his partner Grace Nichols. He has written books of poetry both for adults and for children, from Mangoes and Bullets to Weblines (Bloodaxe, 2000).

Agard has shown a particular commitment to cultural education, and is also a hugely popular performer of his own, mainly humorous, poetry. T think humour can be very powerful. Humour breaks down boundaries, it topples our self-importance, it connects people, and because it engages and entertains, it ultimately enlightens.'

The poem 'Half-caste' comes from Agard's book of poetry for teenagers, Get Back, Pimple! 'The term 'half-caste' is not one a Caribbean would think of using. Mixed races are part of the Caribbean heritage. My grandfather was from Madeira, my mother is Portugese but born in Guyana , my father is black.. A child of mixed race is a tangible, loving expression of human beings from different cultural backgrounds getting together -that should be seen not as something threatening, but as something enriching...'

image taken from: www.nobelprize.org

Derek Walcott was born on the island of St Lucia , in the West Indies , in 1930. His ancestry was both African and European - an English father and an African mother � and much of his work explores issues of Caribbean cultural identity. He has written poetry in both standard English and West Indian dialect.

Walcott has lived and worked mainly in Trinidad and New York , initially as a teacher and journalist, later as a university professor. In the 1950s he founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, and has continued to write both poetry and plays over fifty years. During that period he has become the West Indies ' most eminent writer, winning I international awards for both poetry and drama, culminating in the 1992 Nobel Prize for Literature. His much-praised epic poem (and later playscript) Omens (1990), recrafts the tales of Homer in a Caribbean context. He is also a painter, and the part-autobiographical poem of Tiepolo 's Hound (2000) is illustrated by his own work.

'Love for Love' was first published in 1976, in the collection Sea Grapes. 'The process of poetry', Walcott has remarked, 'is one of excavation and self-discovery.'

Imtiaz Dharker was born in 1954 to a Muslim family in Lahore , Pakistan . She grew up in Glasgow , where she studied Literature and Philosophy. She now lives in Bombay , India , where she works as a poet, artist and film-maker. Bloodaxe have published two collections of her poetry, both illustrated with Dharker's own drawings.

'The reason I'm in India is because I married an Indian. And it has become home now. Though sometimes I feel as if writers don't have homes, that I belong in the cracks between countries, and I actually maybe prefer it that way. For me, my identity has nothing to do with nationality, or religion, or gender. It has to do with beliefs and states of mind.'

'Blessing' is from Dharker's first book, published in 1989, and 'This Room' from I Speak for the Devil (2001).

'The scene of 'Blessing' is the largest slum in Asia � Dharavi, on the outskirts of Bombay . Bombay is the city of dreams. They've come from all over India and they're living in conditions which to anyone else would look squalid but to them it really is the hope of a better life. And because it is not an official living area there is a shortage of water. So when a pipe bursts, it's like a gift...

'For me personally the poem 'This Room' is about making the definitions of nationality, religion, place, place of birth, geography, slip away � crash up through clouds. For someone else, it might be about something different. But for me it was about a moment of immense possibility, the improbable having the scope to arrive.'

Niyi Osundare was born in 1947, in a peasant farming community in Western Nigeria . He studied literature at Ibadan University , Toronto and Leeds . He is now Professor of English at Ibadan . His first book of poetry was published in 1983, since when he has come to be seen as one of Africa 's most innovative, politically committed and cosmopolitan poets. He was awarded the Commonwealth Prize for Poetry in 1987, and the Norna. Award (for publishing in Africa ) in 1991.

In his youth he was an oral singer, or 'town crier', within the Yoruban oral tradition - 'I was born where syllables walk the streets'. He has remained committed to African oral traditions, and to the continent's need to recover from its colonial past. He has also been a bravely outspoken critic of his country's military regimes.

In the 1980s Osundare began a poetry column in a popular newspaper, the Nigerian Sunday Tribune, which aimed to 'attack with the tongue' the ways in which Nigerian people had been treated. Each week, he has explained, 'the government would interrogate me as to what every line of the poem meant, and who I was attacking... But it meant my poetry became a landscape for the people of Nigeria to communicate their thoughts and ideas.'

These poems, including 'Not My Business', were published in 1990 as Songs of the Seasons. A recent book about the poet (published by Africa World Press) is entitled Niyi Osundare: The People's Poet.

Moniza Alvi was born in Lahore , Pakistan , in 1954. Her father was from Pakistan , and her mother was English. Her family transferred to England when she was a few months old, to Hatfield in Hertfordshire. Moniza Alvi has worked as an English teacher in London , and has published three collections of poetry. 'Presents from Pakistan ' is from her first book, The Country at My Shoulder ( Oxford , 1993). She revisited Pakistan for the first time in 1993.

'I've never actually learned my father's language, which I've always been a bit sad about. Growing up I felt that my origins were invisible, because there weren't many people to identify with in Hatfield at that time, of mixed race background, so I felt there was a bit of a blank drawn over that... Maybe I don't consider anywhere as entirely home. When I eventually went to Pakistan I certainly didn't feel that was home, I'd never felt so English...'

'I suppose I would define identity very broadly in terms of what you do, what you respect, and maybe something deeper, your spirit. But it's important to know where you come from, which is perhaps what I was lacking as a child... 'Presents from My Aunts' was one of the first poems I wrote. The girl in the poem would be me at about thirteen.'

Grace Nichols was born in Georgetown , on the coast of Guyana , in 1950. She worked in Guyana as a teacher and as a journalist before moving to England in 1977. She now lives in Sussex with her partner, John Agard. Her first book of poems, I is a long memoried woman, won the Commonwealth Poetry prize in 1983. She has since published several further volumes of poetry both for adults and children.

'I feel at home now both in Guyana and in England . When I'm in Guyana , or another part of the Caribbean , I feel I belong there because I spring from that landscape, I'm still enriched by the myths and the legends and the landscape. But I also feel at home in this culture. I embrace both.'

' Island Man' is from The Fat Black Woman's Poems (1984). 'Hurricane Hits England' is from Sunris (1996). In 1987, the southern coast of England was devastated by The Great Storm:

'The next morning as I walked around Lewes I was very moved by the sight of all the trees that had come down. They seemed to be like so many creatures, like beached whales... It seemed as though the voices of the old gods were in the wind, within the Sussex wind. And for the first time I felt close to the English landscape in a way that 1 hadn't earlier. It was as if the Caribbean had come to England .'

'Huracan' is the name of a Carib storm god. 'Oya' and 'Shango', also storm gods, belonged originally to the Yorubans of West Africa. Hurricane Hattie is a memory from the poet's Caribbean childhood.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/english/poemscult/

https://www.universalteacher.org.uk/anthology/differentcultures.htm