Available as Hardback, eBook
13 August 2026
Thrumming with poetic vitality and questions about the legacies of migration, Shorelines is the prize-winning non-fiction debut by Alycia Pirmohamed
WINNER OF THE NAN SHEPHERD PRIZE
‘A truly original take on migration, family and faith’ NOREEN MASUD
As a young Muslim woman Alycia Pirmohamed grew up with her body as racialised and her faith as seemingly dangerous. Her affinity to the natural world – the mountains, elk and pines of her childhood – conflicted with feelings that she was unwelcome in these landscapes. By contrast, the stories of her parents’ homeland – the monsoon winds, red clay roads and abundant korosho trees – felt painfully distant.
Across interrelated pieces that move from Midwestern Canada to East Africa, the Pacific Northwest to the British Isles, the award-winning poet traces the legacies of migration and memory on her life, examining the idea of homeland and the mythmaking it demands. She creatively resists the expectations of nature writing and memoir, at times choosing to withhold as much as she reveals.
Shorelines moves from lavender skies to lighthouses, from surefooted ideas to liminal spaces. It asks what it means to carry hidden histories across borders and generations – and how losing family can mean losing the place they are from too. Above all, it explores how place and identity intertwine, and how our choices, our actions and the ways we build community shape us into who we become.
“A truly original take on migration, family and faith”
Noreen Masud, Author Of A Flat Place
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”Shorelines fell over me like a wave pools around a body in water. Tender and quietly incisive, Pirmohamed’s poetic prose makes visible sensations, meanings and forgotten inheritances in the aches and unexpected joys of migration. Here is nature writing alive in its attention to movement, to loss and to the ethics that shape our encounters with the world and one another”
Jessica J. Lee, Author Of Turning And Dispersals
“An exquisite, immersive memoir of place and displacement, of caring and grieving and creativity, of selfhood and interconnectedness. Shorelines will transport you in its flow and hold you weightlessly in its lyric pools, in its reflections of the complexities of living a creative life, and finding a place in the tangled world. Beautiful, deep and shimmering with meaning, this is a book to dive into and soak in”
Polly Atkin, Author Of Some Of Us Just Fall
“A gorgeous book brimming with supple writing. The speaker’s longing for what cannot be known is baked into the meditative, patient syntax. The tension of seemingly opposing forces living in the speaker’s body, creates a new place, where identity, home, nature and desire can coexist, swirling in the wind, in the elegance and majesty of Pirmohamed’s language, in the beauty of a “sob”“
Victoria Chang, Author Of Obit And With My Back To The World
“A book that renders lineage, whether ruptured, compromised or intact, the portal to somatic thought. This collection asks profound questions about families, institutions and kinship groups. Pirmohamed’s response is composed with the sea always in mind: “An ocean lyric” that “drags” and “undulates”“
Bhanu Kapil, Author Of How To Wash A Heart
Alycia Pirmohamed
Alycia Pirmohamed is a Canadian-born poet based in Scotland. She is the author of the pamphlets Hinge and Faces that Fled the Wind, as well as the collaborative pamphlets Second Memory, co-authored by Pratyusha and this too is a glistening with Jessica J. Lee, Nina Mingya Powles and Pratyusha. Her debut poetry collection, Another Way to Split Water, was published by Polygon (UK) and YesYes Books (US), and has been shortlisted for Scottish Poetry Book of the Year by the Saltire Society. She is the recipient of several awards, including the Nan Shepherd Prize, a Pushcart Prize, the 2019 CBC Poetry Prize and the 2020 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award.
alycia-pirmohamed.com | @a_pirmohamed | @alyciap_