Meet the author:
Fiona Murphy

How did you first encounter the word ‘sonder’, and what led or inspired you to write about it?

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I encountered the word sonder anew through my teenage daughter’s eyes. We were sitting together and she handed me her phone. A video: a quiet voiceover, a stranger filmed from afar, a caption that read, He was someone’s baby once.

I’d first seen sonder a few years ago in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, but on TikTok the word had gone viral – thousands of people repeating it, whispering it over images of strangers waiting at bus stops, crossing streets, standing in the half-light. A word about the interior lives of others had somehow found its second life in an app designed for brevity and distraction. That contradiction fascinated me. It felt almost devotional, a collective longing for recognition pulsing beneath the noise of this world on fire.

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I saw what it meant for my daughter’s generation to reach for tenderness in public and use the language of the internet to gesture towards care. It made me think about how anthropology, at its best, is also an act of seeing and remembering that every life resists simplification.

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How do you, as the author, see yourself and your research work in relation to this piece and what do you hope readers will take from it?

My work has taught me that speaking for others is impossible, and often dangerous. What’s left is to speak with, to listen, to accompany. That’s the posture I take in ‘The light between strangers’: as someone trying to find a form of language that can honour what resists narration.

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Much of my work circles the question of visibility, who gets seen, who disappears, and what forms of recognition are possible in a world that thrives on selective blindness. Forced displacement, at its core, is an assault on belonging; it turns people into statistics, and grief into policy. I wanted the poem to move against that - to dwell in the detail, in the flicker of a life that might otherwise pass unnoticed.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about the poet Rebecca Tamás’s line that ‘poetry is political, sometimes, in what it doesn’t do – make a meaning that’s clear, commodifiable, empiricist, exchangeable.’ The refusal to simplify, to turn experience into something neatly interpretable, can itself be a political act. Poetry, at its best, offers a brief reprieve from the demand to be useful, measurable, convincing. In a time when language is so often used to wound, to divide, or to sell, poetry can still offer a different kind of speech: one that listens as much as it declares.

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My politics are shaped by the belief that paying attention is itself an ethical act. ‘The light between strangers’ asks what it means to witness without seizing, to write about pain without turning it into spectacle, to let beauty and horror coexist on the same page. If readers take anything from it, I hope it’s a renewed sense that how we speak and whether we stay tender in our speech matters profoundly. Because poetry, like solidarity, begins in the smallest gesture of recognition: the willingness to look again, and to keep looking, until language itself starts to change.​​​

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What motivated your stylistic choice of ‘a lyric in fragments’?

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‘The light between strangers’ moves through the disjointedness of contemporary life, its tendernesses and devastations, its interruptions and hauntings, and the fragment gives that rhythm a form. It acknowledges that clarity isn’t always possible, and that coherence can sometimes be a kind of violence.

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I also think of fragments as small acts of resistance. They reject the fantasy of mastery, the idea that we can make meaning total, or experience whole. They push back against the neoliberal pressure toward productivity, resolution, smoothness. They make space for pauses, for silences, for what doesn’t fit neatly into sense.

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In writing about forced displacement, I’m constantly aware that to force a linear story onto someone’s life is to erase the ruptures that define it. Fragments let me hold those ruptures without sealing them over. They allow for tenderness and doubt, for intimacy without appropriation.

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The fragment, in that way, is not just a stylistic preference, it’s a politics of attention. It lets me stay with complexity rather than resolve it. It invites the reader to listen differently, to dwell in uncertainty, to see the world as layered, in process, alive.

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Could you expand on how ‘the practice of tenderness’ can open up the possibility of an otherwise?

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Tenderness begins as a kind of attentiveness, a refusal to turn away, even when turning away would be easier. It’s an ethical stance, a way of staying with what is fragile without trying to fix or claim it. I think of it as a duty of care, both in writing and in life.

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In the neoliberal academy, tenderness can feel countercultural. We’re trained to analyse, to interpret, to extract meaning but tenderness asks for something slower, something riskier. It asks us to dwell with not-knowing, to write without mastery. It means letting uncertainty remain visible on the page. It’s a practice of humility, and indeed, also of love.

Poetry slows us down; it asks us to listen differently, to feel our way towards understanding rather than impose it. Writing tenderly is an act of resistance against the extractive habits of both academia and capitalism, it refuses to make every life legible, marketable, conclusive. It aims to protect opacity, to allow mystery its due. It is to say: I will stay with this, I will not force it into sense, I will let it change me.

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And perhaps that’s where the possibility of an otherwise begins – in this small, deliberate practice of attention and care, in a kind of writing that refuses to separate feeling from thought, politics from tenderness, knowledge from love.