Sophie Buchaillard is a writer, former Wales Book of the Year finalist and Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She draws on transnational histories and her personal experience to write novels, critical essays and poetry about movement, motherhood and culture. Her work is shaped by migration, multilingualism and an ethic of witnessing, and explores belonging, inherited trauma and the responsibilities of language.

Painting over the cracks / Lucent Dreaming

Inspired by her life, Painting over the cracks is Sophie’s poetry debut. The collection explores the healing power of expression, friendship, and community in overcoming trauma. 

The collection travels from the anxieties of a single mother to emerging memories of buried traumas, and unpicks how unspoken shame colours every interaction, fraying family ties, and making it hard to fully engage with the world. 

The title poem of this collection for shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry Prize in 2024.

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Reviews

Painting Over the Cracks is spattered with colour. In tender and moving songs of change, Buchaillard handles words with a fluidity and ease – bringing a deceptive surface stillness to the currents of rage and grief below.

Anthony Shapland, A Room Above a Shop

Sometimes playful, always precise, here are pellucidly clear poems that range widely, from the weightlessness of water to the horrors of Rwanda, from domestic travails to the darkness of Gaza, consistently searchlighting the world.

Jon Gower, former BBC Wales arts and media correspondent, and the author of Birdland.

Sophie Buchaillard writes with an assured clarity that cuts through sentimentality and stays with you long after you close the pages. There’s rage here and heartbreak and also moments of startling beauty, too: "Love, got swallowed, wasted / in bottles, like reverse potions..." This is a writer with a love of language and a fearlessness that allows her to write nothing but the gut-punching truth. C'est une belle manière de se perdre dans les mots.

Natalie Ann Holborow, author of Little Universe

  • Painting over the cracks

    […] fizzes with pain, anger and the need to reshape trauma through words. The poems explore changing places, languages, identities. Yet the communality of human experience is often returned to. ‘Each a speck/on a line threading us all together.’

    Jane Laugharne, Greenscapes and other poems

  • Painting over the cracks

    Sometimes playful, always precise, here are pellucidly clear poems that range widely, from the weigtlessness of water to the horror of Rwanda, from domestic travails to the darkness of Gaza, consistently searchlighting the world.

    Jon Gower

  • Painting over the cracks

    In her book, Sophie Buchaillard examines what it means to be in exile, ‘in translation, always’ as mother, daughter, partner. With precision of paintbrush, sharpie, rock, she makes her marks, cracks open wounds unflinchingly before painting over them. Her work is as fierce as it is gentle. Although she holds violators to account, she also extends to them patience; love as antidote. These poems are the account of a resilient woman gathering and mapping her self so she may do this for her child and all who are rendered Other, speaking them home, whispering, ‘I see you’. These powerful poems urge us to do the same.

    clare e. potter, author of Healing the Pack