How War Poetry Gave a Voice to Former Female Tamil Fighters Who Fled Sri Lanka for Asylum in the UK

We are honoured to be working with the International Truth and Justice Project (ITJP) ahead of the 15th anniversary of Sri Lanka’s civil war (18 May 2009) on a collection of war poetry by Tamil exiles who all share inspiring stories of survival.

During COVID-19, ITJP began holding weekly online meetings to support asylum seekers. What started as playful writing exercises soon turned into a powerful collection of over 100 war poems edited by one of the world’s leading Tamil poets, Dr. Cheran Rudhramoorthy. Aged between 20-60, the group - known as the ‘Friday Poets’ - includes young women, mothers, and grandmothers. Now they all have asylum, but at the time they wrote these poems, they did not know if they would ever be safe. Writing poetry together has enabled them to reclaim their identities, which have been systematically stripped from them by defeat, detention, and dislocation from their homeland.