Author Profile - L. S. Mensah

Biography:

L. S. Mensah was born and raised in Accra, and been living in the UK for the past 4 years or so. Recently her work has appeared in the annual Barnet Poetry Anthology.


Five Questions with L. S. Mensah:

1. How long have you been writing poetry?

I've been writing since the 1980s.


2. Who are your favourite poets? Which poets have most informed and inspired your work?

Christopher Okigbo is certainly my favourite. I like the way he combines widely diverging disciplines in his work. He was certainly one of the very few African writers whose work embraced other poetic traditions outside of the continent, yet stayed rooted to an African aesthetic.

Richard Ntiru (Uganda), Catherine Acholonu (Nigeria), Sylvia Plath and Seamus Heaney are some poets who’ve also inspired my writing.



3. What do you hope to accomplish with your poetry?

To find a voice and a language with which to express our contemporary reality.


4. Do you have any plans to return to Ghana, for a visit or permanently?

Obviously, though this will be sometime in the future.


5. Are you working on any poems or projects that you think our readers might be interested in?

I'm currently trying to get published. But that’s difficult out here, because poetry publishers are rather thin on the ground.


Contact L. S.:
nomadafricanus(at)yahoo.co.uk

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Poetry is the expression of peculiarity....you do not have to sound like the other person even though you might be talking about the same thing.....I love the level of independence that your featured poets show in their poems....must be nice to have a mind of your own....