Making Literature Travel

Counterpoint: Narrating Migration from the Periphery as Centre brings together four festivals and other partner organisations to explore the theme of migration through collaboration with the Poland-based Armenian poet and artist Tatev Chakhian.

During the upcoming eight months Tatev will develop new work in digital collaboration with Gareth Evans-Jones in Wales and Zofia Baldyga in the Czech Republic, before travelling to Greece to the Thessalian Poetry Festival and to Malta to do an in-person residency in conjunction with the Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival. In November, she will attend the Poetry Day Festival in Prague where she will collaborate with the poet and translator Zofia Baldyga, and showcase the work developed during the project.

Tatev Chakhian is a Poland-based Armenian poet, translator and visual artist, born in 1992 in Yerevan. She graduated from the Faculty of Cultural Anthropology at Yerevan State University, and holds a degree in International Relations and Border Studies from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan where she currently lives. After several years of collaborative poetry projects, she published her first volume of poetry titled unIDentical is an “unofficial document” which grants the reader a passage from the poet’s personal reality to the social one allowing them to wander in and between the spaces. The book was nominated for the 2018 European Poet of Freedom – the 5th edition of the Literary Award of the City of Gdansk – was published in Polish. Tatev collaborates with urban artists, filmmakers and musicians, and her paper collages have been exhibited in Armenia, Poland and Belgium, and translates and promotes Polish poetry, Iranian contemporary poetry, as well as translating from English and Russian. She is the co-editor of www.iranliter.com platform of translated Iranian literature and  Arteria literary magazine in Armenia. Find out more on her official website.

The project is lead by our long-term partner, the  Maltese cultural organisation Inizjamed and their Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival, and involves the Poetry Day Festival and Culture Reset in Prague, Thraka and their Thessalian Poetry Festival in Larissa, and Literature Across Frontiers and the Caernarfon-based Gwyl Arall / Another Festival. The project is co-financed by the European Festivals Fund for Emerging Artists and aims at internationalising the careers of emerging artists through cooperation between festivals.

Featured image: “Wish”, collage on paper by Tatev Chakhian.