Brexit, the pandemic and the battle with language : An interview with Daljit Nagra

This interview with the well-known poet Daljit Nagra was conducted in summer 2022 by Claire Chambers, with Rachael Gilmour providing questions in absentia due to a bout of coronavirus. In it, the three discuss such issues as ‘refugee tales’, poetic ethics and voice, the Brexit referendum’s emboldening of the far right and, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic. Above all, the conversation turns to Nagra’s bending of language via his use of ‘babu English’, his interpolation of Hindi and Punjabi words and his influences from such authors as William Shakespeare, John Milton and Nissim Ezekiel. Nagra looks in particular towards his fifth, forthcoming collection Indiom. In these ways, the interview develops on and updates Chambers’s 2010 interview with Nagra for Crossings and Gilmour’s (2020) chapter on language and voice in Nagra’s first three collections.