Peter Midgley is a poet and storyteller. He has performed in several countries around the world and has published three children’s books, one of which, Thuli’s Mattress, has been translated into 27 languages. He is also the author of two plays and a bilingual volume of poems, perhaps i should / miskien moet ek, from Kalamalka Press. In 2014, he published Counting Teeth: A Namibian Story, a travel memoir in which he considers the Namibian genocide. A second collection of poetry, Unquiet Bones, was published in 2015.

Unquiet Bones

In this uncompromising poetry collection, Peter Midgley questions our positions on war, race and violence. Working in a variety of languages and traditions, the author pushes against ideas of what poetry should be. These are physical poems, poems where you hear the shells exploding and feel the sea ice closing in, poems that linger in your memory.

Counting Teeth

In Counting Teeth: A Namibian story, Peter Midgley travels the byways of Namibia, along with his teenaged daughter, Sinead. A long-awaited return to his childhood home, Midgley’s journey weaves history, politics and a stunning landscape together with a storyteller’s flare. Midgley deftly moves between the bitter past of the country, with its long history of war, to its complicated present where fragments of the South African imposed apartheid still catch the author unaware and mix strangely with the lively, forward-looking Namibia that he is travelling through. Counting Teeth brings the country to life for the reader, its towns populated with unforgettable characters and its stories spilled out like the semi-precious stones the author is offered along the way.