Clementine Ewokolo Burnley's Belling the Leopard reviewed in The Guardian

 

'Clementine Ewokolo Burnley’s poems are thoughtful, wry, yet cumulatively disarming in their vivid, sharply observed renditions of diasporic family life. From West Africa to Glasgow, Edinburgh and the Scottish Isles via Lombardy, London and Berlin, hers is the roving, analytical eye of the Afropean flâneur. A compelling storyteller, she shapeshifts between intimate and sociocultural histories, cities and continents, cousins and aunties, via a deft multilingualism that includes English, German and the languages and vernacular of her ancestral homeland, Cameroon.' – Karen McCarthy Woolf

 

In her wide-ranging debut collection, Clementine Ewokolo Burnley asks what remains after once-familiar places and people have gone. The poems criss-cross the Atlantic, beginning in the 1850s. The voices of Caribbean returnees to the west African coast mingle with those of west African recaptives, German missionaries, and kidnappers. They witness the changes in family life through the generations as villagers or townsfolk are uprooted or stay put or uproot themselves, defying expectations by leaving or returning.

Belling the Leopard was a joint winner of the James Berry Poetry Prize 2024 and is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Autumn 2026. It was published by Bloodaxe Books on 24 September 2026.

Clementine Ewokolo Burnley grew up in Victoria, Cameroon, and has lived between Scotland, Italy and Germany for many years. She has an M.Sc. in Computational Linguistics from Manchester University, and is a UKCP-regulated Processwork therapist, conflict mediator and group facilitator. Her pamphlet Radical Pairings (Ignitionpress, 2023) was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Award. She's received an Edwin Morgan Second Life Award (2020), the RSL Sky award (2021) for creative nonfiction, and a Hawthornden Foundation Residency, in Bologna, Italy. The Scottish Poetry Library selected her poem 'How to Eat Frogs' for Best Scottish Poems (2021). In 2023, a sequence of her poems was Highly Commended in the Poetry Business’ International Poetry and Pamphlet Competition. Her poetry film, Paradise Engines was commissioned by Scottish Poetry Library and the Obsidian Foundation as part of the Africa in Motion Festival (2021). She writes regular reviews, short-form fiction and nonfiction pieces for WritersMosaic, a division of the Royal Literary Fund. She's a non-fiction editor at Bending Genres and a Lector for the Royal Literary Fund Reading Round (2025) in Edinburgh, where she currently lives.

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Belling the Leopard will be distributed in the US via Consortium from 24 November 2026.   

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REVIEW COVERAGE 

Jhalak Review, Autumn/Winter 2026

Clementine Ewokolo Burnley’s first full-length collection Belling the Leopard was very well reviewed in the Autumn/Winter 2026 issue of Jhalak Review.  In this double-page feature, Victoria Adukwei Bulley was reviewing Belling the Leopard alongside Kei Miller’s 2014 Carcanet collection The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion under the heading ‘Into a living language’. 

‘In Burnley’s collection, language becomes a means by which connection is measured – or limited – with themes of loneliness and wanderlust animating the poems. […] Multiple languages flow throughout the book, offering generous visions of a less bordered and more equitable future. And in its slippages, we feel language as something living, which extends beyond cartographies.’ – Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Jhalak Review

The Jhalak Review is mailed out with The Bookseller. In print only. 

US PUBLICITY FOR BELLING THE LEOPARD

Booklist, 3 November 2026

An excellent review of Clementine Ewokolo Burnley’s first full-length collection Belling the Leopard will be featured in the November 2026 issue of Booklist, the book review journal of the American Library Association, to coincide with the book's publication in the US on 24 November.

‘Burnley's first book of poetry crisscrosses the Atlantic and plumbs 150 years of history to bring together the author's Cameroonian heritage and unique experiences living across Europe. Hybrid lyrics sing the many languages of Burnley's life, including the African vernaculars of her childhood, to depict fascinating scenes;’ – Diego Báez, Booklist

In print in the November 2026 issue. The online edition will be available to subscribers.

https://www.booklistonline.com/

 

NATIONAL POETRY DAY FEATURE

London Evening Standard, Thursday 1 October 2026

Clementine Ewokolo Burnley’s ‘justly celebrated’ first full-length collection Belling the Leopard was well reviewed in Olivia Cole’s full page feature in the London Evening Standard on 1 October 2026. Olivia Cole recommended and reviewed five poetry titles for National Poetry Day 2026.

‘Even her own extreme experiences of a life between Cameroon, Scotland, Italy and Germany feel safe when she turns to her family’s history and the stories of enslavement and escape her poems try to piece together. Here, books aren’t around to help us feel better, they’re far more vital than that: smuggled and passed on, like passports to other worlds in which women are educated.’ – Olivia Cole, London Evening Standard (Five fabulous poets to wax lyrical about), on Belling the Leopard 

In print only.

 

REVIEW IN THE GUARDIAN

The Guardian, Poetry Books of the Month, Saturday 5 September 2026

Clementine Ewokolo Burnley’s first full-length collection Belling the Leopard was well reviewed by Oluwaseun Olayiwola in his September 2026 round-up of recent poetry in The Guardian. 

‘The forced migrations and enslavement of colonialism create a latticework of place across the collection, which is Burnley’s primary structuring principle. Between the Caribbean, western Africa and western Europe, Burnley describes the intimate violence and domestic and cultural fallout of their comingling histories: [...] It is at its best when memory and lyric fuse, where the line between recounting and reshaping blurs: […] There’s much to admire here.' – Oluwaseun Olayiwola, The Guardian (Poetry Books of the Month), on Belling the Leopard

In print in The Guardian’s Saturday magazine of 5 September. Online 4 September 2026.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/sep/04/the-best-recent-poetry-review-roundup

 

JOINT REVIEW IN GUTTER FOR EVEN THE TREES & BELLING THE LEOPARD

Gutter, Issue 34, August 2026

An excellent joint review of the first full-length collections by the two Scotland-based winners of the James Berry Poetry Prize 2024, Roshni Gallagher’s Even the Trees and Clementine Ewokolo Burnley’s Belling the Leopard, featured in Issue 34 of the Scottish literary magazine Gutter ahead of the books’ publication in September. Sean Wai Keung introduced his review by saying: 

'These two debut collections, both winners of the James Berry Poetry Prize, present very exciting and distinct voices. They also complement each other in unexpected ways, which is perhaps a testament to the prize itself as well as its namesake poet. James Berry was well known for his diversity of language and style, and Clementine Ewokolo Burnley and Roshni Gallagher pay tribute to this legacy in their own unique ways, with many particularly Scottish twists throughout.' – Sean Wai Keung, Gutter

‘By interweaving languages and cultural symbols so nonchalantly, Belling the Leopard points to a world of fluid identities, where the idea of belonging is both always in question and permanently just within arm’s reach.’ – Sean Wai Keung, Gutter

In print only.

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Roshni Gallagher and Clementine Ewokolo Burnley are both based in Edinburgh.  They will be giving two joint readings in Scotland, starting with a joint launch event for Even the Trees and Belling the Leopard at The Portobello Bookshop in Edinburgh on Thursday 24 September, 7-8pm.  Booking details here.

Clementine and Roshni will be launching their collections online with Bloodaxe on Tuesday 29 September 2026, 7pm, alongside the third winner of the James Berry Poetry Prize, Nadine El-Enany.  All three poets will be reading together at Berwick Literary Festival and Newcastle Poetry Festival in October 2026.

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[04 September 2026]

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