Unarmed combat specialist James Lilley publishes his first book of poems and breaks down conventional wisdom

At 36, this Welsh boxer decided to revive a childhood passion that he had put aside. He has just published “The Blue Hour”, his first collection of poems and organizes, when he is not in the ring, reading evenings to make poetry accessible to the greatest number.
James Lilley is one of the best bare-knuckle boxers in the world and at the same time, outside the ring, he writes poetry. He doesn’t just do it for personal enjoyment, as his first collection of sonnets, The Blue Hour, has just been published in English by Uncle B. Publications. Like a return to his first passion, the one that animated him long before boxing, long before the rings.
He was born 36 years ago in Swansea, Wales, and when he was a child, his favorite activity was writing poems: “I was eight years old when I wrote my first one,” he confided to the BBC. That was long before I got in a ring, and then as I got older, I stopped, I was a teenager, I started boxing, I started hanging out with tough guys, guys for whom poetry was a ridiculous, stupid hobby, so I put that aside and all my energy went into fighting.” The notebooks full of rhymes were forgotten in a drawer, and at 19, James Lilley became a professional boxer, first in MMA, then in bare-knuckle boxing, a type of fighting that is not really regulated in the UK, but not banned either. Today, he is third in the BKFC championship, one of the best in the world, and oddly enough, it was there, at the peak of his career, that he decided to reopen his poetry drawer. He began to question himself during the Covid outbreak, during the succession of confinements, “I sat down at a desk again, in front of a sheet of paper and wrote.”