Seni was born in 1951 to her British mother and Sri-Lankan father, and spent her childhood growing up in Leeds, UK. While Seni initially began writing poetry during her teen years, as a private outlet of self-expression, it was during her time at University that her work became more political. Here, she was involved in making campaign material to support women’s liberation, as well as in protesting the Vietnam War, going on to also write for a political newspaper in North England. 

In light of this, anti-war activism and the championing of refugee rights run through her poems: ‘Some Maps’ depicts how country borders may be invisible, but create deep divisions that people are forced to navigate with pain and difficulty. ‘The Age of Reason’ uses direct address to powerfully encourage the reader – particularly the younger generation - to question our lifestyle and legal frameworks, to celebrate the refugee’s ability of ‘linking continents and cultures’ rather than trying to just ‘keep them out’.  Yet, despite this poetic activism, ‘For Gaza’ reveals the limitations of poetry in creating real-world change.  The idea of being ‘in search of a poem, though my head is full of slogans’ foregrounds Seni’s desire to not turn her poems into pieces of overt political didacticism, but to poetically abstract them so readers do not shun engagement with these anti-war messages. 

Traces of war are further depicted in Seni’s third poetry collection, Unknown Soldier (2019), which won the National Poetry Day Choice award, is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was highly commended in the Forward Poetry Prizes 2020. The collection traverses through imaginations of her father’s perspectives as a radio-operator, during the 1935-49 desert war in North Africa. It is a moving evocation of her relationship with her father, in which the epistolary style of ‘Dear Dad’ - a bittersweet one-sided conversation, recalling memories tinged with longing and nostalgia - especially showcases Seni’s vulnerable and candid poetic voice. 

Other poems in this same collection draw upon Seni’s mixed heritage, for instance ‘The Indian Prince’, which celebrates her mixed heritage through the creation of a makeshift figurine. This sense of celebration is similarly carried into ‘The Weight of the World’, where the comparison of the ‘wet [laundry] sheets’ to ‘vast sails’ evokes the ships of the British Empire, with the speaker and her mother ‘haul[ing] them down’, reconciling Eastern and Western culture in a way previously denied against the backdrop of colonial divisions.   

Seni more deeply explores her mixed heritage in her first collection Wild Cinnamon and Winter Skin (2007).  ‘Cinnamon Roots’ transports us through the colonial history of Sri Lanka, using a cyclical structure to strikingly convey the imperial journey hidden within items in the present day. ‘A Wider View’ is featured in the AQA GCSE poetry syllabus for its striking portrayal of the struggles of the working class - embodied by her great-great-grandad - in Leeds during the Industrial Revolution. Contrastingly, there are also some beautiful recollections of the innocent, carefree memories of childhood – as with the warm nostalgia of ‘Remembered Raspberries’. 

The Heart of It (2012) explores love and heartbreak, the influences of the outside world on an aching heart. For instance the repetition and mirroring of phrases in ‘Paper and Glass’ conveys a speaker stuck in a longing of her past love, while ‘In Which I Repair To Rome’ portrays a desire to resist a relapse into this longing, escaping to Rome and ending with an acceptance of the ephemeral nature of relationships.   

Her most recent collection The Go Away Bird (2023) centres around the imagery of various birds – from being ‘lost in the thrill of the bittern’s mating song’ and absorbing the fleeting joys of the present moment in ‘Lockdown at Leighton Moss’, to being grounded like the ‘stillness’ of the hovering hummingbird in ‘The Habit of Hope’.