I grew up in America and I now live in London with my English husband and children. Years of analysing my culture from afar has revealed the ways I am – like many Americans – a self-mythologiser. Coming from a Jewish and Greek background, one of my big myths has always been the importance of family – an entity that seems both Olympian and fragile – in need of worship and propping up. I experienced this again recently during the endless loop of my extended family Zoom.

Last Thursday, I went out onto my front steps to clap again for the health service with others on my block. At 8 o’clock, there was still a bit of light in the sky; the week before the clocks went back we had all stood alongside each other in the dark.

I have forgotten many things about my early twenties, but I have not forgotten the trip I took to visit my ex-boyfriend in Cairo, Egypt. Those events have played themselves over again in my mind so often they have taken on the sharp edges of fiction. Like fiction, my story is a version of reality, one others might dispute. Nevertheless I believe my memories are true.

The Utopians of Tahrir Square contains poems from 28 young Iraqi poets whose work responds to the protests for human rights that took over Baghdad’s Tahrir (Freedom) Square in 2019. Bringing these poems to life in English was the product of a long collaboration that began on a rainy night in London, during the height of the protests. Anba Jawi, a writer from Iraq who was a regular member of our poetry class at Exiled Writers Ink, came to the group with a heavy sadness. Eyes red, missing sleep, she had been following the protests on Facebook night after night, full of frustration and grief.