In this episode, Claire chats to photojournalist and poet Anastasia Taylor-Lind about her remarkable debut collection “One Language”, which was the winner of The International Book and Pamphlet Competition in 2022. This phenomenal collection is written from the perspective of a female photojournalist, these concise but complex and insightful poems draw on first-hand experience of war to explore how damage is generated and perpetuated. The book’s title expresses the contradiction between the lingua franca of photography and the equally universal language of violence. “One Language” comes to an understanding of personal history and global conflict in poetry that is as immediate and evocative as the most urgent of dispatches.
You can read her poem “Ria Pizza, Kramatorsk, 19:32” here and her poem “Welcome to Donetsk” here.
You can also watch Anastasia´s TED talk, “Fighters and mourners of the Ukrainian revolution”, here.
Anastasia Taylor-Lind is a British/Swedish photojournalist and a poet.
For the past decade Anastasia has collaborated with Alisa Sopova, a journalist and an anthropologist from the city of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine. In 2023, she received the Canon Female Photojournalist Award for her long-term reporting from eastern Ukraine, and over 100,000 people visited her exhibition 'Ukraine: Photographs from the Frontline' at the Imperial War Museum.
Anastasia is a National Geographic Society Explorer, TED Fellow, and 2016 Nieman Fellow at Harvard university. Her first book Maidan – Portraits from the Black Square, about the 2014 revolution in Ukraine, was published the same year. Her debut poetry collection One Language was published by Smith|Doorstop in 2022.
Anastasia has Masters degrees in photojournalism and poetry.
You can purchase a copy of her debut collection “One Language” here.
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