and north korea are about to enter another day. after speaking on the phone earlier, president trump and the japanese prime minister shinzo abe have agreed to meet again, before the us attends any summit with north korea. the latest search for malaysian flight mh370 ends shortly — with still no sign of the missing plane. it disappeared four years ago with 239 people on board. and this video is trending on bbc.com... a migrant from mali who climbed up the outside of an apartment block in paris to rescue a small boy who was dangling from a balcony is being hailed as a hero. the video of his amazing feat has been watched more than 10 million times. and now, as a ‘thank you', he's been promised french citizenship. that's all from me now. stay with bbc world news. 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, is, 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've 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 a — 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've reflected upon in yourlife,

and about your past, is this something you wrote long afterward? 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 abuses 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'd 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 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 don't want that to happen to me, you know. 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? the care system in england stole me from my family. the care worker named me after himself. you are briefly called norman, weren't you? 18 years! it locked me away as a child. yes, i won't 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, the 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.

i am surprised that you have done that in terms of forgiveness rather than in anger, in a way. is there no anger in you? i have been angry. i have been incredibly angry. i have been hurt and i have come to realise, well, i am not defined by my scars, but by the incredible ability to heal. and that forgiveness is part of healing, and that it is really important that i forgive my foster parents and i forgive social services here in england that store my motherfrom me, and 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. people watching this would probably want to believe that when you find your birth mother, and when you went back

to your foster parents, much later in life, when you became a 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 are 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. families are ok. 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. 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 serving addressing 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. thank you 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. 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. 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 have your poems inscribed in grenot in london and manchester. you were the official poet of the olympic games. and of course you at the chancellor of manchester university, which is a lovely and highly prestigious thing to be. do you no longer feel like an outsider? we all feel like an outsider. forever, whether we are inside or not. it is ok to be an outsider. it gives you a unique perspective. 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 there. 0n on monday, there was some respite. most parts of the uk were fine, dry and warm. we are not help woods yet, more storms and heavy rain in the next few days in this warm area through the uk. some storms in the

south of england. not many at all. 27 degrees. the warmest day of the year so far, 27 degrees. the warmest day of the yearso far, in 27 degrees. the warmest day of the year so far, in scotland and northern ireland, much cooler and of the grey skies of the north sea coasts. misty weather pushing in right now, on the eastern breeze. high pressure to the north, no pressure to the south. that brings in more storms, perhaps by morning some showers, in southern counties of england. a great start, in eastern scotland, lower cloud retreating with sunshine developing more widely. heavy showers are possible through the midlands and in wales later in the day. in southern england, the warmest weather in the sunshine for scotland and northern ireland. a lovely day here. those showers ease off, but we could see a cluster of heavy rain and thunderstorms pushing back into the self from east anglia early on wednesday morning. to the north, more mist and fog and low cloud coming back in again. that retreats

into coastal areas, the rain will be on the move. some heavy rain, potential funder too. moving westwards a cross potential funder too. moving westwards across england and towards wales, in northern england. try towards the south—west, conditions should improve in the south—east. sunny skies and the highest temperatures are across scotland and northern ireland. make the most of the dry weather, it probably won't last! pressure is lowering, that's why we find more downpours from the new continent. it moves northwards too. we have some storms in northern ireland on thursday, perhaps in the south—west of scotland. more cloud and more storms pushing back from the south—east and wales. these could be nasty as well. localised flooding from these too. everything moving forward so by friday, in most was northern ireland, northern england and central and southern scotland, allowing something that is drier in more southern parts of

england and wales. temperatures typically in the low to mid 20s or so. typically in the low to mid 20s or so. at the weekend, we see heavy rain and storms in scotland. on saturday, in the south—west on sunday, the south—west and east of england regional —— is largely dry. i'm rico hizon in singapore, the headlines the diplomatic scramble continues — us and north korean officials are due to have another day of talks aimed at getting the roller—coaster summit back on track. time is up on the latest search for the missing malaysian flight mh370. what next for the families still waiting for news of their loved ones? i'm babita sharma in london. also in the programme. a deepening political crisis in italy causes tremors on european financial markets, with fresh elections on the way soon. and the spiderman of paris — the immigrant from mali who's become a french hero after saving

the life of a four—year—old.