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Poet’s Jewish experience inspires debut collection
Natalie Perman's Cataclysm draws upon her Masorti and Reform roots
October 21, 2021 17:17
Natalie Perman's Cataclysm draws upon her Masorti and Reform roots
October 21, 2021 17:17A young poet who has already won a flurry of prizes has published a debut pamphlet inspired by what she describes as her sense of dislocation as a diaspora Jew.
Natalie Perman, 21, who began creative writing aged 17, spoke to the JC ahead of the launch of Cataclysm later this month.
The final-year Oxford student’s collection of poems was influenced by her Jewish background, which she said together with her experience “moving around a lot all over the UK” gave her a “different perspective growing up”.
Ms Perman, whose mother is Jewish and originally from the US, said that while growing up in England she felt either “not Jewish enough or too Jewish depending on where I was living”. She recalled her Masorti and Reform family’s move from Yorkshire — home to a small community and where the nearest shul was an hour away — to the “predominantly Orthodox” Manchester.
The keen Franz Kafka reader said her work had long been concerned with the motif of having to search for one’s home, though she also spoke of having really positive ties to the Jewish community and noted its diverse character.
Ms Perman said about her work: “Some of it is confessional in terms of it being emotions and perspectives about the world and being Jewish in England and my Jewish family and that history of dislocation and the diaspora, but at the same time it’s not because I’m not really confessing to anything.
“I’m trying to transform that history onto the page into something else,” she said.
The pamphlet is being published through the New Voices First Pamphlet Award — of which Ms Perman was one of two recipients earlier this year. Her submission was praised by lead judge David Clarke, who noted her “fully formed” poetic voice and the “energy and urgency” imbuing her entry.
She is a 2017 and 2018 winning and commended Foyle Young Poet and has won the Forward Student Critics’ Award and the Mapleton-Bree prize in 2020. Most recently, Ms Perman, who edits the student publication The Isis Magazine, won the 2021 Martin Starkie Prize.
Cataclysm, priced £7 and published by Frosted Fire, is available on www.wildfire-words.com/natalie-perman