A Foyle Young Poets award winner was featured on BBC TV’s London news programme on Tuesday reciting his hard-hitting poem ‘Welcome to Tottenham’. Seventeen-year-old Giovanni Rose’s poem includes lines such as “We cover our blood-stained streets with dried -up gum” and “where daddy left mummy and mummy’s left poor”.

He goes on to say that Tottenham in north London is a place where “if you look like me it’s harder for you, but everybody’s equal unless they’re darker than you, where police see colour before they see the crime, where children get stopped and searched and aren’t allowed to ask why.”

In the BBC film Giovanni explains that poetry to him “is just rap but in a purer form” and that “I’ve been through quite a lot of stuff that young people shouldn’t ever have to go through, and it’s come to the point where I feel like it’s being normalised”.    

Looking to the future he says: “I personally want to go into finance but I don’t think I’m ever going to let poetry go”.  

You can watch the BBC film here

Background: Full list of Foyle Young Poet of the Year award winners 

PHOTOGRAPH: BBC