Asad Buda is an Afghan writer and artist. He was born during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and was only two years old when his father was killed by the Mujahideen. A member of the country’s Hazar minority, Asad Buda had a religious upbringing. As a teenager he moved to Iran to study Islam. However, his experiences, along with the discovery of writers such as Paul Celan eventually made him question political Islam. He would soon move his focus towards sociology and literature studies in Teheran, where he was later to be imprisoned. In 2015, he came to Sweden on a scholarship as a refugee writer in Karlstad. In this interview, made by Mia Herman, he talks–among other things–about his poem Urbicide and the ideas behind it. The music in this episode was performed by Aziz Herawi.

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Roger Robinson is a poet, activist and the singer of King Midas Sound. The Swedish edition of his latest collection of poems is being released in December 2020, a book entitled A Portable Paradise, which explores the idea of a utopian paradise. Robinson writes about the paradise that was denied the inhabitants of Grenfell Tower, an apartment building in London where a fire caused 72 deaths. And the paradise denied to the so-called Windrush generation, migrants who crossed the sea from former Caribbean colonies to Britain between 1948 and 1970.

Roger Robinson was born in London but moved to his parents’ Trinidad when he was three years old. He eventually returned to London and made a name for himself as a poet in the 90s. In this episode of Clandestino Podcast, he is interviewed by Jakob Kaee from Aska Förlag, publisher of A Portable Paradise in Swedish, and by Maziar Farsin, translator of the book from English to Swedish.

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In episode three of Clandestino Podcast, we meet guitarist and singer Lula Pena. Her music has been praised by the likes of Caetano Veloso, while others describe her voice as a female version of Leonard Cohen or Tom Waits. Traces of French chanson, bossa nova and Greek traditional music can be heard in Lula Pena’s songs, blending with the music she once became known for: the Portuguese fado, songs of loss and longing, once sung by sailors far away on the outskirts of the Portuguese Empire. Markus Görsch interviewed Lula Pena just before her concert arranged by Clandestino Festival at Folkteatern in Gothenburg, Sweden.

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