Aviva Dautch


Aviva Dautch is a British poet, academic and curator, who is of Eastern European ancestry.
Her sequence of poems about clearing her mother's hoarded home won the 2017 Primers Prize and were featured on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour. In 2018 she was commissioned by Bradford Literature Festival to create a poetic response to Gustav Klimt's work to mark his centenary. The resulting film poem was shown at the Hay Festival. The same year she received an Authors' Foundation award from the Society of Authors.
She is well known in the Jewish community, where she lectures internationally on Jewish arts and culture. From 2014–2016, she was Poet in Residence at the Jewish Museum London and these poems received a research award for International Jewish Women in the Arts from the HBI Institute at Brandeis University. Dautch teaches Jewish Culture and Holocaust Studies at the University of Roehampton.

#NeverAgainIsNow

On 19 June 2018, Dautch retweeted a video of detention facilities for refugee children in the United States with the hashtag #NeverAgainIsNow, which went viral. Her tweet was one of the first uses of this hashtag as a rallying cry and commentary on parallels between American President Donald Trump's immigration policies and the Nazi era. Since then, it has been used widely by Jewish campaigning groups across America protesting against migrant detention and the separation of children from their families. During a BBC Radio 4 interview, Dautch explained that her intention was not to diminish the atrocities of the Holocaust, or to suggest that Trump had an explicit genocidal agenda, but as a call to social action and to draw attention to research about the stages through which a climate is created that will allow genocide or atrocity to take place. These include discrimination, dehumanisation and classification and separation of the other both physically and through language.