How Hafez and Bloodaxe Books brought my childhood love of …
In 1986, I was a ten-year-old state-school girl celebrating a poetry competition win sponsored by Bloodaxe Books. Nearly 40 years later, the Newcastle publisher reappeared in my life through Beloved, a collection of poems by the Persian poet Hafez. Somewhere between my mum’s love of poetry, marrying a Persian engineer and consulting a fortune-telling canary in Shiraz, two very different chapters of my life came together.
