Adham Smart

About Adham Smart

Adham Smart was born in 1992 and grew up in Cairo and London. He was three times a winner of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award and has had writing in The Salt Book of Younger Poets, The Cadverine Anthology and Lorsakoff’s Paper Chain, as well as a number of magazines.  He has contributed as a translator to the anthology ‘Six Georgian Poets’ and has translated ‘All the World’s Mysteries’, a novel by the Georgian writer David Dephy, into English,  In 2019 he published his debut collection ‘yes yes mouth’ with Valley Press.

Adham’s recording was made along with the other winners of the Foyle Young Poet of the Year. Talking about the experience of winning the prize and making a recording for the Poetry Archive Adham said:

“Ever since I started writing poetry it has washed over me and ebbed away like the sea on the beach. There are times when I feel like the tide will never come back in, and there are times when I feel like the tide will keep rising and rising until it goes over my head, but I’ve come to realise that this relationship, even if it waxes and wanes, is a constant one, and I will always be near the water. 

 Winning Foyles made me take my writing seriously. It gave me the confidence to keep writing, knowing that there were people in the world who I’d never met who thought my work was good. It wasn’t long after winning that I began to submit poems to magazines and to go to readings, and with each step further I took I learnt more, both about the craft of poetry and the practical side of it. Winning Foyles changed my priorities and the way I thought about myself and what I did, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. 

Recording my poems was great fun. The atmosphere of the recording studio is amazing; there’s a silence there which I’d never experienced before. When we’d finished the recordings, I left the studio with the thrill of knowing that my poems would now be able to be heard as well as read, so adding another dimension to the work that I put out into the world.”