James Cousins is a humanitarian aid worker, English graduate and Irishman. Having grown up in Dublin he moved to South Africa, where he became interested in aid work and injustice, before studying in England at the University of York. Having worked in South Sudan and Sudan his writing is shaped by his experience of conflict, violence and displacement, and he examines home, rootlessness and loss through poetry that is as influenced by Leonard Cohen and Patti Smith as Eliot, Hughes or Heaney.
