Monday 14th May 2018 at 7.30 pm, Betsey Trotwood, 56 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3BL
Presenting writers and languages that are/were spoken within various British communities, some very much alive such as Welsh and Polish, some almost defunct such as Yiddish. Why do some writers choose not to learn or to write in the language of their parents and why do some only express themselves in their parents’ tongue?
Anna Blasiak writes poetry in Polish and in English. She translated over 40 books from English into Polish (mainly children’s books), as well as poetry (by Jastrzębska, O’Donnell, O’Mahony, Evans, Goldsworthy), some fiction from Polish into English (by Czubaj, Grzegorzewska, Krasnowolski. Malanowska, Odija, M.Szychowiak and Amiel [as Anna Hyde]), as well as poetry (by M.Szychowiak and Wiśniewski). She helps run the European Literature Network. More at annablasiak.com
Amarjit Chandan has published eight collections of poetry and five books of essays in Punjabi and his poems have appeared in anthologies and magazines world-wide. He has edited and translated into Punjabi about thirty anthologies of Indian and world poetry and fiction by, among others, Brecht, Neruda, Ritsos, Hikmet, Cardenal, Martin Carter and John Berger. His poems have been variously anthologised and broadcast – notably in All That Mighty Heart: London Poems, Edited by Lisa Rus Spaar, University of Virginia Press, 2008.
Born in west Wales, Sharon Morris trained at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, where she is currently a Professor. Her artworks include photography, installations, film-poems, and live performances with projections. Her poetry has been published in a range of journals including Poetry Review, Poetry London and Poetry Wales, and anthologies such as the Forward Book of Poetry, 2008, and Poetic Biopolitics, 2016. Her two poetry collections are False Spring, 2007, and Gospel Oak, Enitharmon Press, 2013. Her most recent work is The Moon is Shining on my Mother, poems and photographs set in west Wales, Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea and Enitharmon Editions, 2017.
Khayke Beruriah Wiegand is the Woolf Corob Lector in Yiddish at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies (University of Oxford). She also works as a Yiddish teacher in London and leads a Yiddish cultural group, known as the London Yiddish Svive. For many years she has been writing poetry in Yiddish and has had her poems included in various Yiddish publications in New York, Paris, Florence and Jerusalem. Her first bilingual collection was Tsi hot ir gezen mayn tsig ? un andere lider – Have You Seen My Goat ? And Other Poems (H.Leyvik-farlag, Tel Aviv, 2012). Her second collection has just been published in two separate bilingual editions, Yiddish – English and Yiddish – Hebrew, is Kales-breyshis un andere lider – Kalat Bereshit and Other Poems (H.Leyvik-farlag, Tel Aviv).
Open Mic
Host: Edin Suljic poet from former Yugoslavia.
£5 entry/£3 EWI 2018 members and asylum seekers.
If payment is a problem for asylum seekers, no problem: contact in confidence exiledwritersink@gmail.com
