these are the headlines: italy's populists have called for the president to be impeached, following failed efforts to establish a coalition government. president sergio mattarella is accused of provoking a constitutional crisis by vetoing the new prime minister's appointment of a eurosceptic to the post of finance minister. there's growing pressure on the british prime minister to reform northern ireland's strict abortion laws, following the republic of ireland's vote to overturn the abortion ban. any move by theresa may would be opposed by her political allies — the democratic unionists — who are northern ireland's largest party. and us officials are in north korea, trying to revive the proposed summit between president trump and kim jong—un. the discussions are thought to be focusing on details of a possible denuclearisation deal. that's it from me. now on bbc news, it's time for hardtalk.

welcome to hardtalk, i'm stephen sackur. it is dangerous to generalise about the human impulse to create art, but it does seem it's often linked to the experience of dark, painful places. my guest today is a renowned poet and playwright, whose writing and performances lay bare his own intimate wounds. lemn sissay was abandoned as a baby, rejected by his foster family, abused in public institutions of care. he's since been on a quest to understand his past, and piece together his identity. along the way, he found a remarkable poetic voice. how? lemn sissay, welcome to hardtalk.

hi, stephen. you are a writer, a poet, but you're also a public performer. one is very solitary, one, by definition, is clearly public. which is the more authentic, comfortable you 7 you know, i think they're both authentic and both comfortable. you need to... you need to — you need to be alone to write, and to explore, and to find the sort of chemical compound of the poem. and you need to read on stage, so that that chemical compound blows into fireworks and sheds light. you know... and as for poetry, as opposed to other art forms — i mean you've done other things,

and in particular, you've written quite a lot of plays. but i think you've said poetry is your truest self, the voice that lives at the back of your mind. is there something special for you about poetry? as a child, poetry was a place where i could find a familial resonance. in other words, when i had no family, as a child, the writing of poetry would act as memory, so that i could identify where i'd been, who i'd been with, what i felt, at any given sort of time in my childhood. and that's really what family does, and in lieu of that, poetry allowed me to have a place to look back at and say, oh, i was there then. you mean, and i don't want to be too literal, but your poems are almost

like your surrogate family, or substitute family? exactly. if family is a set of disputed memories between one group of people over a lifetime — which i didn't have, i didn't have anyone to dispute the memory, memory is an essential part of family. and my poems were a memory of any given event in my life. well, you've introduced me already to thoughts about your childhood, and it colours so much of your writing, and i guess your take on the world really — what you went through as a child, as a young one. so i do want to talk about it a little bit. and, for people who don't know your story, i mean you were — your mum was a young ethiopian woman who came to the uk, to study, i think. she came in the expansion of ethiopia through the emperor haile selassie, who was sending out students across the world, to get education and then to feed

back into the growth of ethiopia. it was a very exciting time in ethiopia, at that time. was she pregnant, actually, when she arrived? good question. i'm not sure she was pregnant when she arrived. i think i was conceived quite literally in the journey. interesting. but here she was, a young woman in a new country, an alien culture, trying to find her place. and she then found herself pregnant, had the baby, and clearly decided she could not live her life with this baby, at this particular time, and decided to give it up. which was you, of course. women are incredible, 0k? and the act of giving a child away to be fostered or adopted is to me the action of a heroine. and what my mother did was she asked me to be fostered for a short period of time, while she studied, so that she could then take me back to ethiopia. say a year, year and a half? the social worker gave me to foster parents and said, "treat this as an adoption. he's yours forever.

his name is norman." so that was a fundamental deception which changed the course of your life? it utterly changed the course of my life, yeah. so the foster parents took me and they said, "we're your parents now, and we're your parents forever." and i thought they were my mum and dad. they grew up in the north of england... in a very, it has to be said, white, fairly insular community, where you were this brown—skinned baby, and a complete sort of novelty, an alien to many of the people in the community. i — the first time i met a black person, i was nine years of age. so they, the foster parents held me there and said that they were mine forever. and at 12 years of age, they put me into children's homes and said that they'd never contact me again, and didn't. you know, you have had years and years to reflect on this. why do you think they rejected you?

having raised you for 12 years, and then sent you away, for no more contact, it seems the most extraordinarily cruel and strange thing to do. they — i was going through adolescence. so i was the eldest child in the family, and i was taking biscuits from the tin without saying please and thank you, i was staying out late with my friends, and they'd not had an adolescent before. this is what i think. this is the only way i can... but you were 12, you weren't 16. you weren't sniffing glue, or committing serious crime. no, no, i wasn't doing that either. they — they were... they... do you know, they meant to do the best for me, i think, but they were naive. and they were also extremely religious, and they perceived that the devil was working in this equation, and... and yeah, and that's — it's what they did.

it's — it's the most immense, complete form of rejection. yes, and it was complete. i lost everybody. i lost my mother, my father, my sisters, my brothers, my aunts, my uncles, my grandparents, my town, my first girlfriend. everything. from that point onwards, i was in no contact with any of the family, ever. and i was placed in the children's homes, with lots of other children who'd come from abused families, and et cetera. and you were abused. i mean, there was racism and there was physical abuse. there was racism, there was physical abuse. i was in wood end assessment centre at 17 years of age, so i was held in — it was a virtual prison for children for about eight months. this notion that you've already talked about, of writing poetry in a sense to store memory, in a way the poems being the witnesses to what you were going through, when did that began? did that begin when you are in the children's home? yes, it began at 12 years of age.

i knew what i wanted to be. i've always know that i wanted to be a poet. i was always very clear about that, and i made a bbc radio documentary where one of the staff in the children's home, one of the cleaners... cleaners are really interesting people in institutions, because they see everything. they see what's wrong and they see what's right. and because they're not staff, they're not social workers, they see everything. they're a — quite an incredible resource to a child, actually. they should be paid more. um, but one cleaner said, you know, i remember you in the children's home and i remember when you were writing, and i remember you scribbling your pieces of paper and throwing them away and starting again, et cetera. i've invited you — i should say we've discussed this, because you have agreed to do it. i want you to read a poem, because i want people to get a flavour of the poetry, and your voice as well. and it's called children's home, and it's a very powerful and a very

bleak description of what a bit of it felt like. but ijust wonder — this sort of poetry, which is somewhat typical of things you have reflected upon in yourlife, and about your past, is this something you wrote long afterwards? i mean when did you write down some of these things, these memories? i know that i wrote some of these at the time, and i wrote some of them after leaving care. you know, you really do live your childhood out in your adult life. it's not in your childhood that the abuse of being in care actually comes to light. it's when you leave and you draw on your childhood as you grow into an adult. it's then that you see the effect that it's had on you, and it's then that you look back and realise whatever abuses have happened to you. can we hear this one verse from children's home? yeah, this is one verse from children's home. we'd been given booby—trapped timebombs, trigger wires hidden, strapped on the inside. it became a place of controlled explosions, self mutilations, screams, suicide.

of young people returned, return to sender. half—lit dorms of midnight moans. we might well have all been children, but this was never a children's home. "mutilation, screams and suicide." yeah, all of those things happened in the care system. some of them — yeah, yeah. i mean, you've been through the most extraordinary journey in recent years. because you, having reflected for so long on what happened to you, you decided you were going to seek some sort of legal recourse against the council that lied to you — lied to you about your own mother, about your own history and identity, and kept you in those homes forfive or six years. and in the course of taking them to court, you had to go through a psychologist‘s report, an in—depth sort of forensic look deep into your psyche.

mm—hm. that, i imagine, has reintroduced you to so much of the pain that has been inside you for so long? um, uh, yes. i would say that, when somebody else takes a look at your life, and they — they break it down into — into a report, which outlines the damage that was done to you via your childhood, that's quite... that's quite an event, to read that. well, i'll tell you what's even more extraordinary, is your decision to only see and hear what was in that report live, as it were, on a theatre stage, when a fellow actor played the role of the psychologist, and read the report to you and you sat in a chair and listened.

and it was the first time you'd ever heard it, listened to this long exposition of the damage done to you, including the post—traumatic stress, the abuse of alcohol, other forms of mental damage that the psychologist found in you, and you took it all, in front of an audience on stage. a one—off, completely extraordinary performance. why did you do that? i did it because other people have been through this process, particularly in wales, and they've had a psychologist‘s report written about them. and the suicide rate of people who've been through this process is high. so i didn't want that, i didn't want that to happen to me. so i felt safer to hear the report read to me on stage by an actor called julie hesmondhalgh,

here in england. and ifeel safer on stage than i do off it, is probably the truth. what was it like listening to it? it was quite disturbing, and it... but it was quite liberating as well, because there were 350 people, 400 people at the royal court theatre in west london, there just to support me. just to be with me, just to hold me in mind. it was like being hugged by a nation. it was a beautiful event, and i'm proud to have done it. i've not looked at the report since then. haven't you? no, i haven't, and i won't. you've talked about how any society can be judged by the way it deals with the children who do not have their own families, who are institutionalised, cared for by the state. you said in 2012, "you can define

how strong a democracy is by how its government treats this kind of child. i don't mean children, i mean the child of the state." yeah. if you're in care, the government is legally your parent, so... and what does it say about the britain that you have grown up in, your treatment, what happened to you? what does it say? and, you know, children who still struggle and suffer in care today? this care system in england stole me from my family. the social worker named me after himself. you were briefly called norman, weren't you? for 18 years! norman. it locked me away as a child. yes, i won't redress to that. redress to that — and that is important, clearly, because you have pursued that with determination. but there is something us about you which fascinates me, and that's this idea of forgiveness. because as you have

conducted your career, and becoming a renowned poet, you have been on a long—term quest to find family, to find your own birth mother, make sense of her life and her decisions, and the sort of half—siblings that you have around the world. and i'm surprised that you have done that in terms of forgiveness rather than in anger, in a way. is there no anger in you? i've been angry. i've been incredibly angry. and i've been hurt and i have come to realise, well, that i am not defined by my scars, but by the incredible ability to heal. and that forgiveness is part of healing, and that — and that it is really important that i forgive my foster parents and i forgive social services here in england who stole my mother from me,

and even i should forgive my mother because it is very difficult when an adult child comes back to find you. it was very difficult for her, i think. what people watching this would probably want to believe is that when you find your birth mother, and when you went back to your foster parents, much later in life, when you became a very successful artist, what we would perhaps all like to believe is that you found relationships that were meaningful, that you had found family, in a way, in these two different strands of your life. did you? i think i've found — i think it is complicated when you find your family. my father's family, and his brothers and sisters, my aunts and uncles, my mother and her children... we are talking about your birth family, now. the ethiopian family. are they in your life today?

i now know who my family is. the truth is that it is very difficult for them or for me or for any of us to form familial relationships. they're all good people. but it is quite shocking when somebody comes into your family, like me. and in a sense demands a form of truth—telling. an exposing of secrets. familes don't want truths a lot of the time. families want to feel 0k. they want the truth structure just as it is. unfortunately i challenge that. does that mean you can't... and i can tell this is extremely difficult for you, but does that

mean that you cannot really have long—term close relationships with these people from your life? you would have to ask them about that. i mean, just imagine somebody coming into your house and standing there and saying 0k, i am now the oldest brother, and by the way, your parents were sleeping with other people at some point in their life that you do not know about, and stuff. and so i think that possibly — possibly, i do know, family is about what is not said. it is about not seeing things. it is about holding their collective group in mind. i'm somebody who wants answers. my name, lemn, means "why" in amharic. ethiopians now know me as the person called why. having a name like that is a challenge to his family. and i don't know how families work, so i am not very... i am not very equipped to understand the subtleties of family. so no, i don't — most of my family don't speak to me.

my father's children and my mother's children, actually, and you know, yes, it is complicated, stephen. throughout all of this, i have called it a quest. it involved your foster parents and talking to them, too. but through all of us, you have kept writing. it seems to me that there is something interesting about your creativity and your poetry in particular. you say that you have to live in the moment. you say, you know, i cannot live in the past, and i cannot look too

far into the future. i have to be and i have to create in the here and now. and i understand that. and yet so much of your writing, in this sort of anthology and others, is actually about this past. so you do go back all the time in your head. i have to live in the present. thanks for the reminder. now we can start the interview! because that is a survival technique. but the present is actually a product of you coming to terms and coping with and weaving stories about your past. you cannot separate them. if you live in the past, you are not in the present. and you are not alive and real and authentic and true to yourself. i do believe i live in my past. in terms of my writing. i write about what inspires me at the time. and if that includes my time in the children's homes, then that is all well and good, but what happened then affects away now. i think living in the present is a way of living the best life that you can live, and forgiveness

is one of the best ways of being able to live in the present, because otherwise you always live in the past. you go through the process of anger, you go through the process of war, and then you have to look at yourself and equip yourself with the process of peace. that is crucial to anyone you communicate with. and if all you have ever had is the defence mechanisms or the fight or flight mechanism, then you how to learn new ways of being true to yourself and those around you. being in the present is one of the ways to do that. that is interesting.

and what is also striking to me is that in your young life, you were so much an outsider and so much alone, and i think you reflected on the fact that you did not have anybody who had known you for longer than one year. yes. that is an extraordinarily difficult and isolating place to be in many ways. and now you are an artist who is widely respected and renowned. you have received all sorts of accolades — a gong from the queen, you've your poems inscribed in granite in london and manchester. you were the official poet of the olympic games. and of course you are the chancellor of manchester university, which is a lovely and highly prestigious thing to be. do you no longer feel like an outsider? do you feel in some ways now like an insider? we all feel like an outsider. forever, whether we are inside or not. it is ok to be an outsider. you get a perspective on things.

but i don't think it's unique to me. there are tons of us who are outsiders who have lived through the care system and who have become successful, but i'm successful in spite of what happened to me, not because of what happened to me. so this notion of art, and i reflected on this in the beginning when i reflected on our coming out of dark and painful places, you don't believe that your art was, in a sense — that your suffering was a requirement to you to be the others that you are? no, you need to feel a reason to write. that is all you need. it does not have to be about experience. you do not need to have a bad express to be a good artist. otherwise i would tell people to have a bad experience to become a good artist.

that is not true. we all have stories. one of the things that i treasure is the fact that a story like mine allows me to build bridges to people. and for people to build bridges to me. i don't feel isolated as much as i feel i have a reason to communicate. allows me to communicate. and that is a gift. that is a gift. thank you forjoining us on hardtalk. it is an honour, man. thank you very much indeed. hello once again. the thunderstorms of this holiday weekend have certainly been making the headlines — and we are not alone. a quick look at western europe and you see that there are plenty of thunderstorms to be had here. great rafts of cloud across france and germany, the low countries, too. in the forthcoming week, i expect we'll see further thunderstorms in places. it will be on the warm side, initially. light winds and there will be some mist and fog in the forecast.

pretty low cloud to start the forecast on monday everywhere from the lothians down the eastern side of the pennines to about the wash. elsewhere, a lot of sunshine to start the day. and once that heat pours into the middle half the afternoon, we'll start popping off showers to parts of east anglia, the southern counties of england, and up into wales. the eastern shore is plagued in places by the cloud, but elsewhere, much of scotland, the north of england and wales, and over towards northern ireland, dry, fine, and sunny, and really very warm, as well. 20—something in a number of locations — somebody in the south—east will record 28 degrees, we think. and that will keep showers going across the southern counties for a good part of the evening. and the low cloud will pour in off the north sea. this is set up because we have this flabby area of low pressure dominating western europe. around its northern flank, we bring warmth out of the continent over a cold north sea, the moisture condenses, and clouds will form. and it will stay like that for much

of the british isles. eventually that retreats to the eastern shores and we import more showers later in the day. temperatures notjust as high as monday, but still warm for this time of year. as you move into the middle part of the week not a great deal changes. still low pressure over biscay. still tapping into warmth from the continent. showers more available into wednesday. some thunderstorms were bound through the northern parts of scotland and eventually down into it in england, too. top temperatures around 22, maybe 23 degrees or so — many well on into the teens. and the cooler conditions? well, you have to go a long way to find them. northern parts of scandinavia, out in the middle part of the atlantic, but much of the near continent — and we ourselves — are still seeing temperatures above the seasonal norm. so not a great deal of change as far ahead as thursday. does it show any signs of changing at all?

still a lot of thunderstorms there. well, towards the weekend, high—pressure builds, tending to suppress the shower activity, but still keeping it on the warm side. hello. this is the briefing. i'm david eades. our top story: a challenge for northern ireland, after the republic votes decisively to liberalise abortion law. speak to the. here they are beginning to work on introducing legislation to legalise abortion laws. that begins tomorrow. italy's populists call for the president to be impeached, following failed efforts to establish a coalition government. also, france's restoration revolution — safeguarding centuries of heritage with a little help from the brits. also, the rise of the black stuff. 0il traders continue to bet on demand outpacing supply as prices hover close to a four year high.