Yiewsley
ISBN: 9780571396559
Published by Faber and Faber: 21st May, 2026
Daljit Nagra’s new collection presents a spirited and stirring return to his boyhood and the town that made him.
This autobiographical collection candidly explores Daljit Nagra’s experiences growing up from the sixties to the eighties in the predominantly white working – class town of Yiewsley, close to Heathrow airport in Outer London. With his boundless curiosity and radically inventive use of the English language, Nagra brings the period alive in poetry that is both eye – opening and heart warming.
As Britain transitions from a post – war manufacturing economy to the Thatcher years and the computer age, we see a young boy navigating childhood friendships and mishaps, and the intricacies of a multicultural upbringing. Nagra resurrects a bustling house filled with relatives from India, who had arrived, legally or otherwise, in the UK: ‘devout realists already, and always, knuckled into work’.
These poems offer powerful insight into the makings of the writer: the ‘messy English’ at home, fusing with Bollywood ballads, Top of the Pops and hymns at school, to develop a voice entirely his own.
Yiewsley book launch
22nd May 2026, Bobby Fitzpatrick (basement bar)
Extracts from Yiewsley…
now summon the town where you were born
near the bigger towns, your post-war
round-the-clock whistling factory town
with its hoarse hush of conveyor belts
and boiler suits in the graveyard shift
with gloved hands that steer the coal truck
to the coal holes along your gardens
while Norman Wisdom delivers black and white milk
(from lollipop)
let’s place you at the age of five
pretending with your brother to speak a hubbub
of which you know a few words and no grammar
you make sounds most dissimilar to Punjabi
while jutting your mouth
like the cartoon dog Muttley
then you both laugh, it’s so funny
how the English talk –
like tracing paper being cut in a hurry
(from brinjal)
it bound the town together, a gift
for the hospital visit, a drink so classy some raised it
at home like a toast in a wine glass
its wrapping nearly the colour
of the saffron Sikh, bright as the salwar bottoms
your mum wore, who’d call herself
the marigold of God
in whom pure faith will never run dry
its crinkly wrapping like a sweetie paper
you touched with your fingertips
to snap, crackle and pop
and here’s you now
carrying a bottle all the way home
(from Lucozade)
Arc Book Festival
Uxbridge in July 2026. Interviewed by the writer Puneet Bhandal
The Observer poetry books of the month
A writer well-versed in the perils of lyric shame is Daljit Nagra. In his latest collection, Yiewsley, he returns to his predominantly white working-class home town near Heathrow…read more
The Poems We Made Along The Way
Podcaster Gregory Kearns speaks to Daljit about keeping writing as a hobby, taking creative risks, and mentors that were important for his development as a poet…listen here
Daljit Nagra’s Poetics of Tactile Sabotage
He writes with a Bic biro not because he cannot afford a fountain pen, but because the Bic is the ‘comeback tool of the underclass’, a weapon against snobs, a functional commodity…read more
The best recent poetry – review roundup
The classic struggle of each first generation to arrive in Britain, and the pressure on its kids to make good, now sits within a 1960s and 70s time capsule.read more