Nagra: Date with BBC

London, Oct. 5: Daljit Nagra, born to the sound of Air India jets landing at Heathrow and of parents who toiled in factories when they first arrived in the UK from Punjab in the 1960s, was today enjoying his first day as a literary celebrity after winning a major poetry prize last night.

“I will be appearing on Newsnight Review (an arts programme) on BBC,” said Nagra, 40, who is teaching English part-time at a state-funded Jewish faith school in London because he is now making quite a reasonable living as a poet.

Last night at the Forward Prizes for Poetry 2007, an important event in London’s literary calendar, Nagra won the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection for his debut book of poems, Look We Have Coming to Dover!

Nagra’s particular gift is being able to capture Indian voices in Britain, which he has done in the collection brought out in February by Faber, Britain’s leading poetry house.

The poems include The Man Who Would be English!; Arranged Marriage; My Father’s Dream of Return; and Punjabi to Ungreji Guide.

He hopes to tour India when Landmark publishes his book next year.

Nagra makes it clear that his intention is not to make fun of Indian accents — in the way it was done on practically all racist TV comedies in the 1970s — but rather to celebrate the way Indians speak to each other and to others in Britain.

When his £8.99 paperback came out, his poems were enthusiastically received by reviewers.

“Crammed with incident and humour, richly observed, inventive and subtle — this is one of the best first collections in years,” wrote James W. Wood in the Scotland on Sunday.

“Fascinating and heartening,” commented Sean ’Brien in the Independent.

In the Observer, Rachel Cooke said: “It pins the experiences of British-born Indians so vividly to the page. Racism, arranged marriages, corner shops, the mosque; all these things are here, but so, too, are Ms Dynamite, Hilda Ogden, KFC and Torvill and Dean.

“It is a book that tells the story of what it is to be an in-betweener, to be caught between two cultures, both of which you love and, on occasion, fear. I think it is wonderful.”

Nagra’s parents have not yet been to hear him recite his poems. He did his BA and MA in English from the Royal Holloway College, which is part of London University, “but my mother doesn’t speak much English. My father worked in factories and bakeries and my mother in a laundrette. So I do have an issue doing Indian accents because most of the people who read my poems or come to hear me are white middle-class English people”.

Nagra has not so far written about the failure of his own “semi-arranged” marriage but “it is implied in what I have written about marriage”.

Nagra’s fame is spreading to the extent Indians are now turning up to hear him.

The title poem in his book also won the prize for Best Single Poem.