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Poet Jenny Lewis explores the Iraq War through a mixture of diaries, witness statements and formal and free verse. Lewis’s father, T C Lewis, was a casualty of the World War I campaign in Mesopotamia – modern day Iraq, Iran and Syria – and died when she was just a few months old. He joined the South Wales Borderers in 1915 and served in Mesopotamia until 1917 when he was wounded at Kut al Amara while on a working party. Taking Mesopotamia links the Iraq War to its roots in the World War I campaign.

Lewis is a poet, playwright and children’s author and has had plays and poetry cycles performed at theatres across the UK. She teaches poetry at the University of Oxford. Lewis won a prestigious Hawthornden Fellowship during which she translated extracts from The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of Mesopotamia’s oldest works of literature.