Travelling Light
In a surprising change of career some years ago, Alwyn Marriage found herself travelling the world as Chief Executive of two international literature and literacy NGOs. Looking back now on that decade of travel, she reflects in poetry on some of the wonderful people she met and projects with which she had the privilege to work.
Travelling Light won the Hedgehog Prize in the 2024 “Proper Poetry Collection Competition”.The Hedgehog Poetry Press is publishing the book on 14 November 2025.
Alwyn Marriage’s travelogue poems hold surprises, bright blessings and sensory discoveries: they are snapshots of global humanity, thriving despite inequality. An intelligent woman is forced to walk on her knees; there is peril and crime, but also a deep joy in the rich welcomes of Africa, Polynesia and South America; and always an appetite for shared song.
Jo Bell, Host, The Poetic Licence
This eye-opening collection, the fruit of global travels on behalf of NGOs in the 1990s, is astonishing in its reach and breadth of subject matter. Alwyn Marriage has braved black ants and cockroaches, sea snakes and crocodiles, and airplane pilots saying prayers, while witnessing stark examples of women’s inequality, and wondering about the pitfalls as well as the benefits of opening their eyes.
It contains moments of lyricism in many far and wide places, such as aboard the Trans-Siberian Express, when the only remaining fare is smoked salmon and Russian champagne, and swimming into a cave in Samoa, and gazing outwards from it, at the open sea. This fascinating sequence of traveller’s tales from Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Pacific, and eastern Europe, demanded to be written. They are despatches from a time before the internet and social media somehow narrowed our horizons.
Greg Freeman, Write Out Loud