GROWING UP IN DARKNESS

Lemn was born in Lancashire in 1967, but was almost immediately separated from his mother, an unmarried Ethiopian immigrant, and placed with a foster family under the name Mark Greenwood. When ‘Mark’ was 12, the foster family placed him in a care home and said they would not contact him again.

He spent five years in care homes where he experienced mental and physical abuse, resulting in severe psychological disorders including PTSD and alcohol dependence. On leaving the care system he was shown his birth certificate, seeing his given name of Lemn Sissay for the first time, along with a letter showing that his birth mother had pleaded to have her son restored to her. He was eventually able to track down his mother in the Gambia at the age of 21.

Lemn sold his first pamphlet of poems to picketing miners during the miners’ strike in 1984, and soon became a full-time writer, based in Manchester for many years.

His play Something Dark, detailing his experiences in the care system, won the UK Commission for Racial Equality’s Race in the Media Award in 2005. He was awarded an MBE in 2009 and is currently the Chancellor of the University of Manchester.

A vocal campaigner for care reform, Lemn sued Wigan Council in 2018 over the treatment he suffered, resulting in a financial payout and a formal apology.

A year later he won the PEN Pinter literary prize. The judges said: “In his every work, Lemn Sissay returns to the underworld he inhabited as an unclaimed child. From his sorrows, he forges beautiful words and a thousand reasons to live and love.”