As a boy in South Africa I dreamed of a romanticized England; now, in England, I dream of South Africa, and though I\u2019ll never live there I sometimes still feel it\u2019s where I most belong.<\/p>\n
I was born in England but spent my first fifteen years in Pietermaritzburg, in Natal, where my father was a university lecturer. My mother was South African. I came to England for the last three years of my schooling at Leighton Park School in Reading. I studied English at Queens\u2019 College, Cambridge, and Merton College, Oxford.<\/p>\n
My father teased me with having a magpie mind as a boy, and I have one now.<\/p>\n
My poetry reflects changing interests in languages and literature, history, art and mythology. I\u2019ve loved classical Greek history and mythology since boyhood and taught myself Modern Greek as an adult, though my ability to read or speak it has become increasingly rusty. I know enough French and Italian to enjoy reading in both languages. I had no interest at all in the South African history our teachers crammed down our throats in Pietermaritzburg, but I\u2019ve discovered since how full of wonderful stories it was, like the early history of America on a more concentrated scale.<\/p>\n
My poems have appeared in a wide range of magazines. I\u2019ve published a pamphlet (Homelands<\/em>, with Dagger Press) and a collection of short poems (Through the Window<\/em>, with Rockingham Press). My book Their Mountain Mother<\/em>,\u00a0mainly consisting of\u00a0a long narrative poem about the Basuto hero Moshoeshoe, was published by Hearing Eye Press in August 2009.<\/p>\n I was on the organizing committee of the Manchester group Poets and Players, which organizes performances of poetry and music, from 2007 to 2022, and tutored for the Poetry School for several years. I write reviews for several different poetry magazines.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As a boy in South Africa I dreamed of a romanticized England; now, in England, I dream of South Africa, and though I\u2019ll never live there I sometimes still feel it\u2019s where I most belong. I was born in England but spent my first fifteen years in Pietermaritzburg, in Natal, where my father was a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":2,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2598,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2\/revisions\/2598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}