Death and detergents: Spanish poet sets hospital laundry work to verse

Begoña M Rueda reflects on her prize-winning account of laundry work during the Covid crisis

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Spain was not long into the first wave of the Covid pandemic when the poet and hospital laundry worker Begoña M Rueda realised there wasn’t quite enough room on the public pedestal for all those who worked in the country’s over-stretched and often under-resourced health system.

“At eight, people step on to their balconies to applaud / the labours of the doctors and the nurses / but few applaud the labours of the woman who sweeps and mops the hospital / or of those of us who wash the linen of the infected / with our bare hands,” Rueda writes in one of the poems that makes up her latest collection.