Poverty Safari is a winner of the Orwell Prize in 2018. The author, Darren McGarvey offers us a biographical account of his life in working class Glasgow suburb Pollok. Darren is a rapper who does extensive community work and is also a socially conscious intelligent man with his finger on the pulse of the problems poverty creates for working class people across the UK. This book explores personal examples of his life on the periphery and transcends into a political journey where he encourages disillusioned working class people to seize the initiative and follow his model of self improvement in order to escape the constraints of our country’s enduring classist system. He writes very fluently and considering he claims he has hardly read any books at all, his writing style is erudite , flowing and engaging to the reader. His safari takes us on a journey through community centres and jails, to his own personal battles against alcoholism and drug addiction. He intimately describes his own struggle in growing up in a working class family. The tragic loss of his estranged alcoholic mother during her mid thirties who hailed from the Gorbals estate in Glasgow was a sad anecdote but his relationship with his father in later years suggested a maturing of his attitudes and forgiveness towards his parents. I think the best thing about the book is that to any politician or community leader who doesn’t directly face immediate poverty, there is a steady flow of real life examples of the actual daily war that disaffected poor people face in our poverty stricken working class communities across the country. From the Pollok free state to annoyance at media bourgeois values and its general ignorance of the poorest in society, there is anger in this book but that is equalled with passion and an irresistible desire for social justice. Politically McGarvey is generally in support of leftist values yet he doesn’t wholly agree that politicians on the left truly are unique in offering a solution to the poor. Racism and the uncontrolled immigration where many migrants end up the brunt of political violence on rundown estates like Pollok lends him some sympathetic views towards the far right. He discusses the reality of life and genuine values and has a tendency to criticise the nanny state that overlooks and peers down at his contemporaries as though they lack the ability to understand or absolve themselves of their issues and the silencing of the political voice in rundown estates that are overlooked are symptomatic especially of the wider societal issues at play in the modern day, especially under a Britain where Tories have run government continuously for well over a decade. I’m a house music DJ myself and live on a poor council estate in South Wales. Like Darren I have used my music skills to engage with the community by running DJ workshops which have opened my eyes to a wider aspect of society and I feel that he touches base very well with the most marginalised people’s struggles in today’s world. It’s quite a dark scary tale yet the conclusion is quite spiriting and enlightening as the key he identifies as being self-motivated and using self improvement it is possibly the only real way out of this safari park and I think that the book could inspire many as well as encouraging politicians to amend their views on poverty in the U.K.