These are the Things we Have Lost

A poetic memoir from an award-winning journalist tracing love, loss and the truths we dare to speak.
In her debut poetry collection, These Are the Things We Have Lost, Janice Warman chronicles a journey from her South African childhood to the landscapes of motherhood with unflinching honesty. From pregnancy 'high on hormones and Pellegrino', to second weddings, these poems capture intimate moments of love and loss. With a journalist's precision and a poet's sensitivity, Warman's voice moves between continents and decades. A celebration of life's joys and an elegy for what inevitably slips through our grasp.

Janice Warman is an award-winning writer of YA fiction, non-fiction and poetry, based in Crowborough, East Sussex. She is a financial journalist, and a creative writing tutor at Share Community, Clapham Junction, for disabled adults. Her poetry has been published in magazines in the UK and South Africa, in The Hey Nonny Handbook, the women’s literary survival guide (Harriman House), in Ballet, a poetic and photographic tribute to her mother (Susakpress/Spiralbound) and in English textbooks in South Africa. She is a past winner of the Kent & Sussex Poetry Society Folio Competition. Her journalism career spans The Guardian, The Observer, the Financial Times and BBC Radio 4.

Her YA novel The World Beneath, the story of a young boy growing up under apartheid (Walker Books/Candlewick, endorsed by Amnesty International) was a winner in the Children’s Africana Book Award in the US. Class of 79 (Jacana) was her tribute to her three fellow journalism students of the seventies who risked their lives to destroy apartheid.