London Pastoral

Maggie Wadey is a writer of fiction, screenplays, memoir (The English Daughter, Sandstone Press, 2016) and, more recently, poetry. Daughter of an Irish mother and an English father, her childhood was spent in England, Egypt, Cyprus and a Sussex boarding-school. For the last two decades she has lived with her husband and a thousand books in Hackney, close to Victoria Park. The poems in London Pastoral are drawn from her experience of this corner of London and on twenty years of great change: personally, locally and, more widely, in both the human and the natural environment.
Her poetry has been published in magazines including Acumen, Pomegranate, the High Window, London Grip and Vole Books. She has twice won the Wells Open Poetry Competition and had the joyous experience of having a poem (‘They Came Like Swallows’) read out in Westminster Square at an Extinction Rebellion demonstration. Although she has been writing and drawing since childhood this is the first time her images have come together with her poems.